Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

172 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

spend money and train workers” (pp. 129–130). Relocating abroad
then comes as an almost instinctive progression in Levov’s logic. He
laments the old days when vestiges of workmanship and dedication
were still involved in the trade, but he realizes that those times have
long since passed in the United States:

Nobody cuts gloves this way anymore, not in this country, where hardly

anybody’s left to cut them, and not anywhere else either, except maybe

in a little family-run shop in Naples or Grenoble. These were people,

the people who worked here, who were in it for life. They were born

into the glove industry and they died in the glove industry. Today we’re

constantly retraining people. (p. 75)

This complaint about the loss of craftsmanship and its concom-
itant traditions is ironically steeped in classical Marxian overtones;
and Roth appears to be making an almost direct reference to Marx’s
theory of the predictable development of capitalist production,
which holds that

the more highly capitalist production is developed in a country, the

greater the demand will be for versatility in labour-power, the more

indifferent the worker will be towards the specific content of his work

and the more f luid will be the movements of capital from one sphere of

production to the next.^90

For Levov, however, the increased apathy appears to be formed
spontaneously: an anomaly that exists in spite of the auspicious
benefits brought by free-market capitalism rather than a result of
its normal functioning. He also believes that the outsourcing of
Newark’s industries to areas of cheap labor are merely a response
to the unfavorable social and financial situation peculiar to the city
(and nation), without considering the fact that such moves will exac-
erbate some of the very conditions he decries (p. 15).
We can observe these deleterious effects of deindustrialization on
Newark in some of the many descriptions of “the city’s collapse”
that recur throughout the narrative (p. 24). Levov’s father offers per-
haps the most vivid accounts of this when he describes scenes of
“fires in abandoned buildings. Unemployment. Filth. Poverty. More