FOOTING THE TURF
Roth is a monologuist, by nature and design a drifter, though he has appeared often in Chicago. For the last four or five years he’s honed his writing and story-telling skills, constructing hour-long fantasy excursions in which the surreal and the banal intersect curiously. Despite his self-deprecating style, his work has always been disarmingly profound. Saying something like “When your back is up against the wall, you’ve got everything in front of you,” he lets us know that this statement is both too simpleminded to be true and too true to be simpleminded. Roth reminds us that naivete can be an asset.
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And Roth allows himself to speak in a more poetic voice, creating stories that don’t add up yet create curiously resonant images. In one story, Roth as a child is sitting in a tire swing hung from a sycamore tree, listening to men play poker in the house. At one point his friend’s daddy emerges and rides Roth’s yellow bike–with a banana seat–around and around the sycamore, expounding upon how much he hates that tree. Then he lies down in the back of a pickup truck and dies.
