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The author of the best American immigrant novel, Call It Sleep, dividends with this posthumous work. Observed in a collection of practically 2,000 unpublished web pages by a young New Yorker editor, this is actually the final novel by Henry Roth whose Call It Sleep was shared in 1934 and who ''staged the literary comeback of the century'' (Vanity Rational) with Mercy of any Rude Stream in 1994.
Set in the dire 12 months of 1938, the novel reintroduces us to Roth's alter-ego, Ira Stigman, a 32-year-old novelist, wanting to assimilate but psychologically traumatized by the scars of his impoverished immigrant history. Restless along with his older enthusiast and literary mentor, the renowned English professor, Edith Welles, whose obsessive love has crippled him, Ira, a ''slum-born Yiddle'', journeys to Yaddo, the famous writer's colony, where he meets a blond, aristocratic pianist, whose inherent nobility and ''relaxed, Anglo-Saxon radiance'' engages him.
The ensuing intimate turmoil, as well as the discord between his ghetto Jewish roots and the bourgeois comforts of Manhattan, forces Ira to abandon the comforts of his paramour's Greenwich Village apartment. In his relentless search to become writer, a man and an American, Ira heads Western world with an illiterate, boorish Communist, with an illusory search for the assurance of the American West. Thumbing rides from gruff truckers, traveling the rails with hobos through the Dust Bowl, Ira explores America's inherent splendors and its own Major depression tragedies as he returns home, uncertain if he'll marry, questioning if he ll ever before be able to make anything of his lapidary prose.
Place against crumbling piers and glimmering skyscrapers in Manhattan, against seedy engine courts and tufted hand trees in sun-soaked LA, An American Type isn't just, perhaps, the last first-hand testament of the Major depression, but also a common statement about the frequent reinvention of American identity, and, with its lyrical stopping, the transcendence of love.
