I shared part of the 23-hour bus ride to Vientiane with a Scottish gun salesman named Ian, who, I couldn’t help noticing, was reading Sabbath’s Theater, by Philip Roth. At one point, Ian leaned over and asked me what one of the words meant. The word was “yarmulke.”
He was only 30 pages away from the end of the book, so he must have come across that word several dozen times by then. I wondered how I would change his perception of the novel with my answer. I told him a yarmulke was a flightless sea bird, similar to a puffin.
I also wondered at the statistical likelihood of a flame-haired, freckled Scotsman reading a Philip Roth novel on a chicken bus in Laos; of that Scotsman asking his seatmate the definition of the word “yarmulke;” and of that seatmate coincidentally being an East Coast Jew, and therefore uniquely well-equipped to field questions about Philip Roth. Unable to work out the math in my head, I instead asked Ian how he came to be reading that particular book.
Turns out his reading selection was purely random. He had rescued a pile a books from a box headed for the trash. The Philip Roth was among them.
I asked him if the humor translated. He assured me that it did, and that he was looking forward to reading more of the same. Sensing that I was a fan, he gave the book to me after finishing it, for which I am grateful. I recommended that he next read Portnoy’s Complaint.
I wonder what he’ll think of me when he gets to the liver scene.
