Despite his status as a Jew and the buried shame of his home life, Ira manages to make friends, and the consuming joy of friendship gives him some idea of who he might be — or who, at any rate, he longs to be. Roth introduces us to Farley Hewins, the son of an Irish undertaker who captures something of all that is “flawless and pure” in America. Farley bears no resemblance to a greenhorn. He is “a blond, trimly built youth, somewhat more mature than the rest, handsome, blue-eyed, with a rounded jaw, a light voice and a buoyant gait.” Roth might be describing a young Douglas Fairbanks. On Sundays, the two boys hitchhike out to the suburbs where Farley’s aunts and uncles live, and here, among these quintessential Americans, Ira gets a vicarious taste of what he’s really after: “In the steadiness, in the tranquility of Farley’s unassuming assurance, his good-humored poise, and the affectionate regard with which he was greeted and held by his kin, Americans all, part and parcel of America in their warm, tidy, suburban kitchens into which the breeze from the green outside seeped through the screen door, Ira could almost imagine that acceptance of himself was only a shadow away.”
Farley is but one in a series of friends through whom Ira cycles as he attempts to touch directly an idealized America open only to its more deserving Christian sons and daughters. After Farley we get the dauntless and Huck Finn — like Billy Green. “ ‘Boyish’ was the word that might best describe him, boyish in the best sense, in the American sense: self-reliant, sportsmanlike, outdoors-oriented, adventurous and yet supremely sane.” Billy Green is not merely the antithesis of everything contained inside Ira’s hermetic tenement world and an antidote to his incestuous pathologies; he is the apotheosis of America.
Billy Green gives way to Larry Gordon, a worldly and wealthy young man with artistic aspirations. Ira assumes the attractive young man must be a Gentile. He’s too assured, too assimilated, too “regular” to be anything but. Wanting to impress when he first meets Larry, Ira causes a ruckus in his elocution class. He’s asked to explain his behavior after class, and his words reveal, nakedly, devastatingly, how lowly he finds himself, and how deeply he longs for approval from his Gentile peers. “I felt like I found a friend,” he explains to the offended teacher. “He was rich and he wasn’t Jewish, and he liked me.”
But as it turns out, Larry is Jewish, complicating in interesting ways the type of boy Ira befriends: this one is one of his own. An expansive friendship grows up between them: Larry introduces Ira to modern poetry while Ira, somewhat more reluctantly and confounded by the appeal, introduces Larry to Yiddish phrases and greenhorn customs. Ira is everything the well-heeled Larry finds exotic. In the more sophisticated boy’s company, Ira, who has scorned the greenhorns who attach to him by blood, becomes the greenhorn incarnate.
This series of friendships has been Ira’s ad hoc way of escaping the oppression of the immigrant ghetto, and of living, if only temporarily and vicariously, the healthy, incest-free life bestowed as a birthright upon other Americans. But if Ira is going to find his true self in some more lasting way, he’s going to have to leave Harlem behind entirely. It won’t be easy. He’s poor. He’s denied certain rights simply because he’s Jewish. And he disdains the capitalist enterprise that so many of his relatives and fellow Jews consider the essence of the American dream. It increases his sense of isolation: the country cares only about “things that had the least meaning for him, that he didn’t give a damn about.” The traditional escape from material poverty would have been, for Ira as for Roth, indistinguishable from suicide.
What speaks most forcefully to him is the world of books. Books “took you into their world. [Y]ou were more in their world than in the Jewish world. [M]aybe some day he’d find a way out of his Jewish slum world into their world.” They rescue the boy from his squalid surroundings and self-loathing and, later, introduce the possibility of a more permanent escape when it occurs to him that he might be capable of writing a book himself.
This awareness dawns slowly over the course of his friendship with Larry and later with Edith Welles. In ways overt and inadvertent, through their appetite for the exotic and their own artistic striving, Larry and Edith awaken Ira to a fateful fact: his source of shame — the low roots, the deprivations and depravities of an immigrant childhood — is, for the budding artist, an embarrassment of riches. James Joyce’s Ulysses, an early copy of which Edith gives to Ira in upstate New York after Larry scorns it, shows him how to put those riches to good use. To slip the bonds of Jewish immigrant life, Ira will have to return to it, tunnel deep inside it, and transform it into art. To escape requires embrace.
We get a sense of Ira’s artistic potential early on in the book, when he spots a star shining over Mt. Morris Park. He can be no older than nine or ten when he thinks like a writer for the first time. The revelation is worth quoting at length:
And he passes below the hill on Mt. Morris Park in autumn twilight, with the evening star in the west in limpid sky above the wooden bell tower. And so beautiful it was: a rapture to behold. It set him a problem he never dreamed anyone set himself. How do you say it? Before the pale blue twilight left your eyes you had to say it, use words that said it: blue, indigo, blue, indigo. Words that matched, matched that swimming star above the hill and the tower; what words matched it?. . Not twinkling, nah, twinkle, twinkle, little star — those words belonged to someone else. You had to match it yourself: swimming in the blue tide, you could say. . maybe. Like that bluing Mom rinses white shirts in. Nah, you couldn’t say that. . How clear it is. One star shines over Mt. Morris hill. And it’s getting dark, and it’s getting cold — Gee, if instead of cold, I said chill. A star shines over Mt. Morris Park hill. And it’s getting dark, and it’s getting chill.
Like Farley and Billy Green before him, Larry Gordon is eventually discarded and replaced. Ira, like Roth, is a shrewd young man, as people of any greatness must be if they hope to escape the inauspicious circumstances of their birth and finally achieve something of lasting merit, and to that end must choose Edith over Larry. Edith represents a natural progression: she is a Gentile, an intellectual, a mentor, and in time, she will become a patron and a lover. Confusing Ira for an innocent, she confides in him. She takes him into her complicated (and progressive) personal life, and he doesn’t judge her for what she discloses. The two develop a trusting friendship, so that when it comes time for Ira to confess his own transgressions, which he does under great duress, like a character out of Dostoyevsky, Edith doesn’t judge him. She forgives him — shows him mercy — so that he may forgive himself. Edith restores the romantic ideals Ira finds in books, which he thinks closed to him forever on account of the incest. With their restoration comes the permission to dream, to live, to write.
Mercy is an epic of the outsider, a chronicle of self-survival and self-discovery and the realization of the self. It’s also a masterpiece of immigrant fiction. It’s what would have been called, even a few decades ago, a great Jewish-American novel, written by a pioneer of Jewish-American fiction. But though it applied at the time of Call It Sleep, to call anything a great Jewish-American novel now, with Malamud and Bellow under our national belt, and with a different Roth retired but transcendent, and a new generation of American Jews writing vital and varied fictions, is ghettoizing. No one calls Philip Roth a great Jewish-American writer, or Junot Díaz a great Latino-American novelist.