The 'thirties, in America even more than in England, was the period of socially conscious fiction and of much theorizing about what was called the proletarian novel. Inevitably, Call It Sleep was seen as an attempt at a proletarian novel; or it was judged that it would have been a better book if it had been a proletarian novel…. (p. 443)
Call It Sleep must be the most powerful evocation of the terrors of childhood ever written. Lost, bewildered, friendless, the small boy David scuttles through the streets of the Lower East Side like a frightened little animal lost in a jungle inhabited by the larger carnivores. We are spared nothing of the crudeness of cosmopolitan slum life and living…. And all the terrors the boy experiences in the streets of New York are brought together, symbolized, in his fear of the tenement houses in which he lives, the dark, rat-infested cellars with their overwhelming suggestion of mindless and brutal animality, the sweating stairways to be tremblingly climbed to the topmost apartment, which means warmth and security because his mother is there, and, finally, the roof above, the escape to which is freedom.
This is a free excerpt of 192 words. There are 678 words (approx.
2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Roth, Henry 1906–: Critical Essay by Walter Allen Access Pass.
