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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
Clearly Arnold Rothstein has stirred something in Tosches, but he's not sure what that is, and the result is we don't know either. "When I set out to write this book," he tells us, "I was intrigued by the figure of Arnold Rothstein. I still am. But as I researched more deeply, I came to see that the picture of him that history gave us was wrong. Was I to offer a different picture? Was I to take a man's life and make of it an exercise in interpretation? Was I to claim to have arrived at the 'truth'? Was I to fabricate a 'riveting portrait' by hiding one aspect of him and presenting another, without ever knowing -- who could? -- which aspect of him held weight and meaning for him, in his life, as he lived it? This would be to compound the misknowing that already was." I wanted to scream in exasperation at this passage: Well, what's it to be, then, Nick? If all you're going to tell us is that other people before you had it wrong without taking the responsibility of telling us what you think is right, then why did you write the book in the first place -- particularly when nothing you offer us fundamentally alters the picture of Rothstein given us by earlier writers?
But then, less than a page later, Tosches tries to answer his own rhetorical questions. "Why Rothstein's life? ... Because Arnold Rothstein is a shadow figure beyond good and evil ... And if that shadow is ultimately unknowable, as it must be, I was resolved that it should not go ultimately misknown, or wrongly known, as it had been. Let others tell you the shade and length of Christ's hair without offering a single bare fact establishing his existence." Is Tosches attempting some kind of existential riddle with Rothstein as a hipster Jewish martyr set up to deny the existence of Christ?
I get the uneasy feeling here that Tosches is using Rothstein to muscle in on Christ's territory -- please excuse the gangland terminology, but somehow it seems oddly appropriate here -- as king of the Jews. The truth is, though, that I really don't know where Tosches is trying to go. How exactly is a man who fixed ball games and horse races and who financed dope dealers and killers "beyond evil"? If those things are beyond evil, then what is evil? Does he mean "beyond evil" in a Nietzschean sense? Or in a purely legal sense, because the law never caught up with Rothstein? (He was shot to death after a card game in 1928 following what appears to have been a rather trivial personal dispute. Tosches, to my knowledge, is the only writer who appears to find something mysterious about Rothstein's killing.)
And what does it mean that Arnold Rothstein is a "shadow figure" and that "that shadow is ultimately unknowable"? Perhaps he would be less shadowy and more knowable if Tosches hadn't spent nearly a third of his book meandering from the origins of Jewish names to the history of dice before getting to his subject. And is he saying that Rothstein is more unknowable than other denizens of the demimonde? Or is Arnold Rothstein's a special case of unknowableness? And if Rothstein is so unknowable, then what does it matter that his shadow is "ultimately misknown, or wrongly known"? If he's unknowable, then how does Tosches know that somebody else's Rothstein is wrongly known?
Is Tosches trying to tell us that everyone is, in the final analysis, "unknowable"? Great, that's sure what I want to fork over my $25.95 to hear. I'm reminded of the old Woody Allen routine: "What if there is no reality? What if existence is an illusion?" Answer: "In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet." If the author thinks the subject of his book is "ultimately unknowable," I want my money back. No, better still, I want him not to have written the book and taken up my time.
The minor league myth of Arnold Rothstein isn't big enough to hold all the metaphors, mysteries and metaphysical baggage that Tosches tries to cram into it. Rothstein isn't a big enough subject for Nick Tosches' talent. "King of the Jews" is a work of hero worship without a hero.
