Philip Roth

David Brauner

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847796615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

This is a groundbreaking study of the most important contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading alongside a number of his contemporaries and focusing particularly on his later fiction, this book offers a highly accessible, informative and persuasive view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer.

1

Introduction

For so long an enfant terrible of the American literary world, Philip Roth may now be considered one of its elder statesmen. He has published eighteen full-length works of fiction in an oeuvre that spans high seriousness (Letting Go (1962)) and low humour (The Great American Novel (1973)), expansive monologue (Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)) and elliptical dialogue (Deception (1990)), spare realism (When She Was Good (1967)) and grotesque surrealism (The Breast (1972)). In addition to the novels for which he is most renowned, Roth has also published two novellas (The Breast and The Prague Orgy (1985)), a collection of short stories with a novella (Goodbye, Columbus (1959)), two collections of essays (Reading Myself and Others (1975) and Shop Talk (2001)), a political satire (Our Gang (1971)), an autobiography (The Facts (1988)) and a memoir of his father (Patrimony (1991)), as well as numerous articles, reviews and uncollected short stories. This book offers an overview of the career of Philip Roth, with particular emphasis on his later work, and an assessment of his contribution to contemporary American fiction.

I have been reading Roth for over twenty years and writing about him, on and off, for over a decade, so this book is the product of a prolonged period of research and reflection. Like any long-term relationship, mine with Roth has had its ups and downs, but I have never felt like walking out or giving up. More accurately, perhaps, I have never felt able to withdraw from this intense engagement with his work. For me, Roth is the most gripping of writers. At one point in The Ghost Writer Nathan Zuckerman – the author protagonist of many of Roth’s novels – is told by his mentor, E.I. Lonoff, that he has ‘the most compelling voice I’ve encountered in years’ (Roth 1989: 52) – and this is the key to Roth’s power as a novelist. Whether writing comedy or tragedy, satire or epic, fable or farce, when the narrative voice in Roth’s fiction speaks, I, like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), ‘cannot choose but hear’ (Coleridge 1985: 47).

Although the style and content of Roth’s fiction is extraordinarily diverse, there is always audible a distinctive voice: irreverent yet earnest, questioning yet authoritative, subtle and nuanced yet powerful and passionate; above all, obsessive, compulsive, driven. In an interview, Roth once remarked of The Anatomy Lesson (1983) that ‘[t]he book won’t leave you alone. Won’t let up. Gets too close’ (Roth 2001a: 141) and this applies equally to all his work. When Henry Zuckerman complains bitterly that his brother Nathan ‘could … leave nothing and no one alone!’ (Roth 1986: 231) he is also identifying one of the distinguishing features of Roth’s work. Roth, too, leaves nothing and no one in his fiction alone. Ira Ringold, the protagonist of I Married A Communist (1998), having beaten his adversary ‘to a pulp’, returns moments later ‘to make the victory total’ (Roth 1998: 300, italics in original), and Alvin, the cousin of the protagonist Philip in The Plot Against America (2004), not content with shooting dead a German soldier, ‘crawl[s] over to where he was … sho[o]t[s] him twice in the head’ and finally ‘spit[s] on the son of a bitch’ (Roth 2004: 150). Like the characters he creates, Roth never rests easy, never feels finished. He tracks down his quarry again and again, revisiting old hunting grounds and breaking into new ones; honing, refining, sharpening and expanding his armoury.

Writing about any living artist presents certain difficulties: the writing is still evolving, the reputation built on that career being revised as each new work appears. Writing on contemporary American fiction is particularly problematic because it is a very crowded field and one which is especially susceptible to the fluctuations of literary-critical fashion; new contenders for the title of ‘Great American Novelist’ are constantly appearing and, more often than not, soon afterwards, disappearing. Writing a book on Philip Roth entails confronting further obstacles: the fact that he himself is such an eloquent and persuasive critic of his own work, and that other criticism of Roth has become something of a minor (or maybe not so minor) industry, makes the task of finding something new and worthwhile to say about his work a challenging one.¹ The accelerating process of Roth’s literary canonisation – symbolised by the reprinting of his collected works in the prestigious Library of America series² and his receipt of the four major literary prizes in America (the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award (twice), the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), as well as the Gold Medal in fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters – has ensured that work by Roth and on Roth is receiving more attention within the academy than at any previous time in his career.

During the last decade of the twentieth century and the first of the new millennium, critical accolades for Roth have been growing steadily in number and volume. Although some critics, such as Mark Shechner, have long argued that Roth possesses ‘the most distinctive voice in American fiction’, his position in the pantheon of classic post-war American authors was for many years somewhat precarious (Shechner 2003: 216). Critical acclaim and controversy came early to Roth and ensured that he was one of the most fashionable American novelists at the end of the 1950s and 1960s, but in the early 1970s his sales and his literary reputation began to decline and he was often regarded as the junior partner of a Jewish-American triumvirate that included Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. This trend continued throughout the seventies and most of the 1980s, when younger novelists such as Don DeLillo and Paul Auster, who seemed to owe more to Thomas Pynchon than to Roth, established themselves, and the work of African-American novelists, most notably Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, threatened to eclipse that of their Jewish-American peers. The publication of The Counterlife in 1986, however, signalled the beginning of Roth’s second coming and over the course of the 1990s he was indeed often treated as the saviour of American fiction, not only resurrecting his own career but redeeming a genre (realist historical fiction) and a generation (those American writers born in the 1930s who made their names in the 1960s) that had seemed to many largely exhausted.³ Having often been compared unfavourably to John Updike over the previous twenty years, Roth now found himself used as the yardstick by which all his peers, including Updike, were measured. James Wood reflected this shift in the balance of power between these two prolific post-war American novelists by claiming in 1997 that ‘[t]hose who think John Updike is a great American writer would surrender this illusion if they attended to Roth’s greater stringency and intellectual urgency’ (Wood 1997: 9). Sean O’Hagan suggested that Roth had nothing to fear from younger rivals either, pointing out that ‘[w]hile newer talents such as … Jonathan Franzen have been praised for their attempts to create the Great American Novel for our times, Roth, without fuss or fanfare, has written four of them in the last decade’ (O’Hagan 2004: n.p.). The reviews of The Plot Against America (2004) yielded an especially rich crop of tributes to Roth’s pre-eminence. For example, his fellow novelist, the South African two-times winner of the Booker Prize, J.M. Coetzee, compared him to the greatest figure in English literary history, suggesting that ‘at his very best he reaches Shakespearean heights’ (Coetzee 2004: 6); Greil Marcus argued that ‘his supremacy as the most commanding novelist of his time’ was now unchallenged (Marcus 2004: 1); Alan Cooper felt that Roth had moved ‘into a realm of narrative seldom attained’, displaying a mastery at which ‘[m]ost professional writers will just gape’ in awe (Cooper 2005: 252); David Herman called him ‘a great writer, one of the best writers of the second half of the twentieth century’ (Herman 2004: 76) and Esquire magazine went one better, awarding Roth the tag of ‘the greatest fiction writer America has ever produced’ (cited on the official Roth website of Houghton Mifflin). Finally, Blake Morrison considered that, ‘given the extraordinary late blooming of an already illustrious career … the word genius doesn’t seem excessive’ and finished his review by posing the rhetorical question: ‘Isn’t it time they gave him the Nobel?’ (Morrison 2004: 2).

Given that his literary stock has never been higher, and looks likely to retain or even increase its value, Roth would seem now to represent a safe investment for any critic. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has stayed the course, and seems likely to be read and taught on college courses for many years to come. Yet writing about Roth remains in many ways a risky venture. Roth’s critical reputation has not always been stable; over the years it has fluctuated considerably. In his introduction to a collection of essays on Roth’s work in 1982, Sanford Pinsker observed that ‘[n]eutral criticism hardly exists where Roth is concerned … critics … either love his work or hate it’ (Pinsker 1982: 2–3). In fact, for the first twenty years or so of Roth’s career, the hate was more in evidence than the love, often manifesting itself in personalised polemics that offered little insight into the work itself, being more concerned with the morality of its author. Few contemporary authors (with the obvious exception of Salman Rushdie) have inspired such animus: Jeremy Larner accused Roth of being ‘a liar’ (Larner 1982: 28), John Gross was offended by his ‘intolerable knowingness about lubricants and deodorants, menstruation and masturbation’ (Gross 1982: 41) and Robert Alter accused him of harbouring ‘a kind of vendetta against human nature’ (Alter 1982: 45). An extraordinarily vicious, ad hominem attack was published in 1972 in Commentary (a journal devoted to Jewish-American culture that had published a number of Roth’s early stories), by the influential Jewish-American critic, Irving Howe, who had written an enthusiastic review of Roth’s first book Goodbye, Columbus. Howe charged Roth with, among many other things, ‘not behaving with good faith’, displaying a ‘failure in literary tact’ and a ‘need to rub our noses in the muck of squalid daily existence’ (Howe 1982: 234, 238). Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s first and fourth books, excited most controversy and I will have more to say about their reception in the following chapter, but some later novels were also condemned in unusually emotive terms. Joseph Cohen, for example, dismissed The Anatomy Lesson as ‘merely a spewing forth of venom’ (Cohen 1992: 197) and Philip Hensher denounced Operation Shylock as ‘a dishonest and wicked book’ and ‘an immoral misuse of fiction’ (Hensher 1993: 11). Morris Dickstein described Sabbath’s Theater as ‘ugl[y]’, ‘deliberately offensive’, ‘a work of profound self-loathing’, ‘a bitter retrospective … [that] smells of panic and hatred’, and ‘an execration in the face of critics who had long since stopped criticizing, a gauntlet thrown down to feminists who had long since stopped caring’ (Dickstein 2002: 225, 228).

Even among his ostensible supporters, admiration for Roth during the first half of his career tends more often than not to be tempered with a certain distaste for (what was perceived as) his own bad taste. Most of the authors of early books on Roth seemed slightly embarrassed by their choice of subject and often took him to task: Sanford Pinsker felt that Roth is too ‘self-indulgent’ a writer (Pinsker 1975: 73); Bernard Rodgers that Roth’s ‘persistent flaw has been a tendency towards diffusiveness’ (Rodgers 1978: 148) and Judith Jones and Guinevera Nance that he was guilty at times of ‘exhibitionism’ (Jones and Nance 1981: 72). When praise was forthcoming, its faintness was sometimes damning: George Searles, for example, in the introduction to his book on Updike and Roth, offered a half-hearted endorsement, averring that Roth had ‘contributed several decidedly superior works that are quite likely to endure’ (Searles 1985: 7). The first monograph on Roth seriously to redress this critical imbalance and to begin to do justice to the richness and complexity of Roth’s work was Hermione Lee’s study, in which she makes a powerful case for Roth as ‘a writer of remarkable virtuosity and adventurousness’ (Lee 1982: 82). Though now of course rather outdated, Lee’s slim book remains one of the best to have been published on Roth and its author one of the few early critics of his work to move beyond parochial debates about whether or not Roth was a good thing for the Jews towards a more sophisticated analysis of his work in terms of its aesthetic value and formal qualities.

The ten years between Lee’s book and Jay L. Halio’s Philip Roth Revisited (1992) was, as Halio’s title implies, a relatively quiet period in Roth criticism, broadly coinciding with the nadir of his critical reputation. It was a period in which Roth seemed to many observers to have become ‘increasingly self-contained, writing beautifully poised sentences in a vacuum of ingenuity; a writer’s writer, writing about a writer writing about a writer writing’ (Brown 2000: 67). From the mid-1990s onwards, however, writing on Roth ‘exploded’, as one of the best of a younger generation of Roth critics, Derek Parker Royal, puts it (Royal 2004b: 145), so that now, in the words of one of the best of the older generation, Mark Shechner, ‘[y]ou can drown in Roth criticism’ (Shechner 2003: 245).⁴ Unlike the earlier criticism, most of this later work is both more sympathetic to its subject and more rigorous in its analysis.

Alan Cooper’s book Philip Roth and the Jews (1996), though at times guilty of reading Roth’s works as too narrowly personal, nonetheless represents an important advance on the much cruder, reductive biographical criticism to which Roth’s earlier books were often subjected. The argument of Steven Milowitz’s book, Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer (2000) – that Roth’s fiction is best understood in terms of its engagement with the Holocaust – is at times tendentious, often tenuous and occasionally perverse, but it contains some very thoughtful, original readings of selected texts. Mark Shechner’s book, Up Society’s Ass, Copper (2003), consists largely of material that has appeared before, with some ‘second’ and sometimes ‘third’ thoughts appended, but is nevertheless a useful reminder of the fact that its author has been one of the most consistently perceptive and entertaining critics on Roth for four decades. The most important of the later books on Roth, however, is Debra Shostak’s Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives (2004). Shostak’s central thesis – that ‘Roth’s books talk to one another as countertexts in an ongoing and mutually illuminating conversation, zigzagging from one way of representing the problems of selfhood to another’ – is not entirely original,⁵ but she develops it in greater detail and with greater tenacity than anyone else has. Hers is the first book to make extensive use of the Library of Congress collection of Roth papers and the first to do justice to the implications of his work for the larger questions of how we read and how we think about identity. Shostak’s Bakhtinian reading of Roth as a ‘dialogical’ writer demonstrates persuasively that his work is much more open-ended and diverse than has generally been acknowledged.

What Shostak does with Roth she does extremely effectively. She is, however, guilty of two notable sins of omission. Firstly, in her insistence on the ways in which Roth’s texts read each other, she neglects to consider the ways in which they read, and are read by, other texts and consequently gives the impression, at times, that Roth’s work is somewhat insular, produced and consumed in isolation from his predecessors and contemporaries. Secondly, although she expertly teases out the intellectual, philosophical and psychological complexities of Roth’s fictions, she doesn’t have that much to say about Roth as a stylist. Indeed, the efflorescence of Roth criticism in the early years of the new millennium notwithstanding, there has been little attention paid to these aspects of Roth’s work – a situation that this book seeks to redress. Whereas authors of books on Roth used to complain with some justice that ‘Roth’s work has suffered the fate of being either misread or misused’ (Wade 1996: 130) or, in more charged terms, that Roth has been the ‘[v]ictim of gross misreadings’ (Milowitz 2000: ix), the work of Shostak and others has moved the nature and level of the debates on Roth on and up. However, there are still many aspects of Roth’s large and ever-expanding oeuvre that remain neglected.

The task of the Roth critic should no longer be to defend the embattled author but rather to recognise and examine the ambiguities, ambivalences and paradoxes that make Roth’s fiction demand and amply repay repeated readings. In the chapters that follow, I engage in detailed analysis of texts and suggest a number of contexts in which these texts can be situated, reading them in terms of their relation to each other but also juxtaposing them with work by some of Roth’s contemporaries. I am interested primarily not in questions of influence but in the possibilities for mapping intertextual connections that such juxtapositions offer. Rather than attempting to survey all of Roth’s work, I concentrate on the second half of his career, from the publication of The Ghost Writer (1979) to The Plot Against America (2004).⁶

In the first chapter I argue that the four books that comprise the Zuckerman Bound series – The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and The Prague Orgy (1985) – represent a detailed exploration of the ethical and aesthetic conflicts faced by the post-war Jewish-American writer. Focusing on Roth’s use of legalistic language in these fictions, I suggest that the trials (the tests and ordeals) which Nathan Zuckerman (the protagonist of all four books) undergoes not only reflect Roth’s paradoxical responses to the critical reception of his earlier work by Jewish readers but also function as metaphors for the ways in which, historically, Jews have often judged, and been judged, by themselves and others. The second chapter considers some of the ways in which Roth’s generic experimentation, which I trace from his early novel My Life as a Man (1974), through The Counterlife, The Facts (1988), Deception (1990) and Operation Shylock (1993), appropriates, complicates and finally parodies aspects of both realism and postmodernism, making connections between these texts and works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O’Brien and Bret Easton Ellis. In the third chapter, I discuss Roth’s treatment of morality, mortality and masculinity in what I consider to be his masterpiece, Sabbath’s Theater (1995), comparing it with a short story by Stanley Elkin and a novel by Howard Jacobson that share many of its themes. The fourth chapter develops work that I began in my previous book, Post-War Jewish Fiction (2001), exploring Roth’s use of what I call the ‘anti-pastoral’ mode in his ‘American Trilogy’ ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The trials of Nathan Zuckerman, or Jewry as jury: judging Jews in Zuckerman Bound
• 3 The ‘credible incredible and the incredible credible’: generic experimentation in My Life as a Man, The Counterlife, The Facts, Deception and Operation Shylock
• 4 Old men behaving badly: morality, mortality and masculinity in Sabbath’s Theater
• 5 History and the anti-pastoral: Utopian dreams and rituals of purification in the ‘American Trilogy’
• 6 Fantasies of flight and flights of fancy: rewriting history and retreating from trauma in The Plot Against America
• Afterword
• Works cited
• Index