Their fathers are unable to make even these choices, only to decay over the abyss of memory. All, young and old, are superfluous men to an extent Lermontev could not have conceived. Women are attendant upon them in this circumstance. Roth, although he often shows Joyce’s uncanny ability to write about women from under their skin, sees them according to their influence on men. “We love the world they represent and the destiny they mark out for us.” While his women are rarely shown as overtly rejecting this male-determined solution to their existence, they are always unspokenly convinced of their entitlement to life, whether necessity determines it should be lived behind a bar, in a brothel bed, or as an old grande dame in poverty. No better than the men, they connive and plot; but even when he shows them at their slyest and most haughtily destructive, he grants them this spiritedness. If one reads the life (his) from the work, it is evident that Roth suffered in love and resented it; in most of his work desired women represent sexual frustration, out of reach.

The splendid wholeness of Roth’s oeuvre is achieved in three ways. There’s the standard one of cross-casting characters from one novel to the next. There’s the far bolder risk-taking, in which he triumphs, of testing his creativity by placing different temperaments from different or (even more skilled) similar background in the same circumstances in different novels. There’s the overall paradoxical unity of traditional opposition itself, monarchic/revolutionary, pitched together in the dissolution of all values, for which he finds the perfect physical metaphor: the frontier between Franz Joseph’s empire and the tsar’s empire, exemplified in Jadlowsky’s tavern, which appears in both The Radetzky March and Weights and Measures. There, the rogue Kapturak, a Jew whose exploitation of others’ plight stems from his own as a victim of tsarist anti-Semitism, hides the Russian army deserters he’s going to sell to labor agents in America and Australia. The only contacts between men are contraband; commerce of this kind is all that will be left of the two monarchic empires fighting each other to a mutual death, and the only structure that will still exist in the chaos to follow; the early twentieth-century class struggle will arise from that.

Roth’s petite phrase in the single great work into which all this transforms is not a Strauss waltz but the elder Strauss’s Radetzky March, in honor of the Austrian field marshal who was victorious against Sardinia. Its tempo beats from the tavern through Vienna and all the villages and cities of Franz Joseph’s empire, to Berlin in those novels where the other imperial eagle has only one head. For Roth’s is the frontier of history. It is not recreated from accounts of the past, as War and Peace was, but recounted contemporaneously by one who lived there, in every sense, himself. This is not an impudent literary value judgment; it is, again, the work that provides a reading of the author’s life. Here was a writer obsessed with and possessed by his own time. From within it he could hear the drum rolls of the past resounding to the future.

Musil’s evocation of that time is a marvelous discourse; Roth’s involves a marvelous evanescence of the author in his creation of a vivid population of conflicting characters expressing that time. His method is to show a kind of picaresque struggle on the inescapable chain of the state. He rarely materializes as the author: There is his odd epilogue to Zipper and his Father, apparently some sort of acknowledgment that this, his most tender book (for while their situation makes both Musil and Roth ironic writers, Roth is tender where Musil is detachedly playful), is a form of the obeisance to the past that is autobiography. And there is his prologue to The Silent Prophet, his most politically realistic and least imaginatively realized book. In this prologue he comes as near as he ever will to an authorial credo with respect to his pervasive theme, the relation of the individual to the state. He says his characters are not

intended to exemplify a political point of view—at most, it [a life story] demonstrates the old and eternal truth that the individual is always defeated in the end.

The state or empire is the leg iron by which his characters are grappled. The political movement against the state, with the aim of freeing the people, in Roth forges a leg iron of its own by which the revolutionary is going to find himself hobbled.

Roth manages to convey complicated political concepts without their vocabulary of didacticism, rhetoric, and jargon. In the bitter experiences of Franz in Flight Without End, disillusion with the revolutionary left conveys what must have been the onetime-revolutionary Roth’s own experience more tellingly than any research into his life could, and points to the paradox that runs through his novels with such stirring dialectical effect on the reader. The old royalist, capitalist, hierarchic world of Church and State, with kings assuming divine authority on earth, their armies a warrior sect elected to serve as the panoply of these gods, is what he shows ruthlessly as both obsolete and bloodthirsty. But the counter-brutality of the revolution, and the subsequent degeneration of its ideals into stultifying bureaucracy—surely the characterizing tragedy of the twentieth century-leads him to turn about and show in his old targets, fathers, mothers, the loyalist, royalist landowners and city fathers, enduring values in the very mores he has attacked. This hardly provides a synthesis for his dazzling fictional dialectic. One who came after him, Czeslaw Milosz, expresses the dilemma:

Ill at ease in the tyranny,
     ill at ease in the republic,
in the one I longed for freedom,
     in the other for the end of corruption.4

The ten years between 1928 and 1938 seem to mark the peak of Roth’s mastery, although the dating of his novels in terms of when they were written5 rather than when they were published is often uncertain, since in the upheavals of exile some were not published chronologically. The Radetzky March (1932), Weights And Measures (1937), and The Emperor’s Tomb (1938) are both the culmination of the other novels and the core round which they are gathered to form a manifold and magnificent work.