Book Review: Philip Roth Unbound

The Nobel Prize and various and sundry matters

By Jonathan Price

Philip Roth died a month ago. And it is a great loss though little surprise since he was 85 and had intentionally retired from writing six years ago and not given a farewell tour. His prominence is perhaps indicated by several articles the next day in the main section of the New York Times¹ marking his death, and a two-day retrospective of his interviews with Terry Gross on Fresh Air² (culled from seven interviews over the past, say, 25 years).
    A death is always an occasion for shock, recognition, and reevaluation—in theory, and on surface, of the person who has died, but also of course of ourselves, of our culture, and particularly in the case of great writers, of our prospects as human beings. Perhaps this is especially true for me in the current case of Roth, whom I first started reading in the 1960s, toward the beginning of his and my career, when I was an undergraduate English major and first read Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go. Among other connections, Roth was raised as a Jew and became postreligious; so was I and so have I. This is not to try to partake of Roth’s other qualities or to establish equivalence at all, but simply to attach the connections as reader and observer. This is also in some ways a personal reminiscence, rather than a thoroughly professional evaluation (after all, I’m an emeritus professor of American Literature). So I must confess I haven’t read all of Roth’s fiction.

Roth had been a significant figure in American letters since the publication of his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, which consisted of its title novella and a number of signature short stories. In retrospect he seems to have written almost tirelessly since then, though he did acknowledge, in one of his Fresh Air interviews that there was a 5-year lapse in the mid-sixties. In all he wrote 28 novels and a number of semiautobiographical works as well as essays on other topics, such as Reading Myself and Others. Clearly a major writer, some say the most prominent or best American fiction writer of the last 25 years. I could debate that, but perhaps only because it seems at some level that such a designation is pointless. It might pit Roth against writers such as Updike or Bellow or Cormac McCarthy. Maybe it would only reveal various readers’ tastes and opinions, or assertions about certain numbers. So what?

Many recent Roth obituaries have pointed out that he won virtually every literary award except the Nobel prize for literature. Roth himself, somewhat facetiously, remarked that he might have had the Nobel if he had titled Portnoy’s Complaint something like—paraphrasing here—“The Critique of American Capitalism.” When David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, asked Roth what he thought of Dylan’s Nobel, he replied, “It’s OK, but next year I hope Peter, Paul, and Mary get it.” These seemingly offhand, comic remarks presumably reveal a certain wistful resentment of his own inability to get the Prize. That’s completely understandable, though perhaps as much a critique of the Nobel itself as an implicit assertion of his own merits. After all, since it was initiated in 1901, the Nobel has only been given to one writer a year, except for 1942 and, apparently, this year, when the literature committee is being reconfigured following a scandal. Since it’s only given once a year, and to a living writer for a current book, what are the odds that only one writer in the entire literary world deserves it in a given year? (Given the nature of scientific development and understanding, the prizes in science are frequently given to multiple scientists in a single year. But not in literature.) And how likely is it that the writer is likely to be alive by the time his or her reputation catches up with the literary production? Also, how likely is it every year that a committee of Swedish academics is sufficiently attuned to the fact that literature is always the product of a particular language and culture to be competent to award the appropriate prize? Little of this really accounts for the ways in which the prizes are used by authors, publishers, cultures—and ultimately the reading public—as badges of significance, of arrival, or of unassailable transcendence over other writers similarly situated in competition? In a way, the process makes readers a little like sports fans, who want a single winner at the end of a season-long competition. But sports are far different from literature, written usually in quiet recesses, and gradually distributed and absorbed and assessed by multiple readers over many situations and often not in a single year, but over the vastnesses of time.
    Roth arguably could have, would have, should have been a contender for the Nobel—probably along with other American writers missed, such as Robert Frost. One could include John Updike, another potential nominee, who wrote 26 novels—almost as many as Roth—but also volumes of short stories, poetry, memoir, and essays with an overall total near 40, and he was still writing fiction in the hospital as he was dying. But perhaps there’s nothing missed in not being ranked along with Pearl Buck and Bob Dylan and John Steinbeck, who—from some points of view—might be cited as dubious winners of the literature prize. Perhaps it’s better to be with Marcel Proust, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas, Henry James, and Mark Twain, who all—for various reasons—never received the prize.

Twenty-eight novels are quite a few, especially when they’re not just part of a repetitious series but involve continual reinvention of characters, renewed search for themes and subjects and milieus, and are written over a period of some fifty years. Roth is often cited for his renaissance in what for a writer of fiction is usually considered old age, for later works like the American trilogy of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Plot Against America. Or for his even later series of much shorter fiction. One of these is a meditation on decay and death, with a title presumably taken from the iconic early medieval play Everyman.
    Roth’s first two efforts in fiction, Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go, he dismissed late in his life as juvenilia, early work he had transcended. My feelings are very different. That’s OK. Literature, like horse races (as Twain once observed), is about differences of opinion. I’m still quite fond of them, and I think they wear very well in comparison with many of his later efforts. Goodbye, Columbus is a coming-of-age novel, a great American (and human) tradition in the line of—to name a very few—Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Catcher in the Rye. The central character, Neil Klugman, must come to terms with his lower middle-class upbringing, his pursuit of elegance and romance in the person of Brenda Patimkin, the Radcliffe-attending heiress to an undistinguished plumbing business. But it’s really the American dream he is forced to evaluate and to say goodbye to—goodbye to Columbus and his promises—and begin a more realistic life. Like so much contemporary (and Rothian) literature, the plot turns on a sexual nexus, when Brenda’s parents discover her diaphragm and learn that she is having sexual relations with their presumably prospective son-in-law. Those elements seem clearly outdated, but the emotional dilemmas and family dynamics remain powerful and credible.
    There is a Jewish element to these early stories but it hardly limits them. Some readers seem occasionally in doubt as to what constitutes “Jewishness” and there’s no simple answer to this question. It’s far more or less than religion and it’s also cultural; and finally, to some extent, it’s a matter of each person’s perception. One of my remaining favorites is still “The Conversion of the Jews” where Ozzie Freedman, a budding bar mitzvah student in his early teens, maintains to his class (contradicting his rabbi) that God could make a virgin pregnant without sex and is slapped for the insight. The incident leads to a comic and powerful climax in which Ozzie gets the people who assemble and try to talk him down from a rooftop to admit that “God can make a child without intercourse,” and more significantly gets them to “Promise me you’ll never hit anybody over God.” It’s amusing, cute, near-sentimental, but also in its own way not just comic about sex, but also brimming with theological and moral insight. Somehow the sentence that begins with “Promise me” seems resonant these days of religious righteousness and violence. Much of Roth’s early fiction, though often centered in Jewish life, and with Jews as major characters, created controversy in the Jewish community. Roth, to the end of his life (especially noteworthy in one of the Terry Gross interviews), maintained he was an atheist and had no interest in religion because it was irrational.
    Roth’s early iconic work was undoubtedly Portnoy’s Complaint (1967)—my paperback of the time reminds me it was “the number 1 bestseller,” and it was, and was made into a mediocre film. It was a blockbuster, barrier-busting novel, but I’ve never thought of it as a particularly good book. In essence, it’s a kind of long, intricate, Jewish-oriented, imaginative dirty joke about masturbation. In a way, it even made masturbation fashionable, at least for comment and discussion, but it’s hardly a powerful revelation. The novel ends with the Punch Line: “So [said the doctor], ‘Now vee perhaps to begin. Yes?’”
    Another comedy routine—Portnoy’s long assertion, complaint, confession—is merely a prologue to psychoanalysis, a kind of tour de farce of male (sometimes Jewish) hangups with a caricature of a Jewish mother. It’s all fairly funny, but in the end, and certainly in retrospect, hardly moving. By contrast, in The Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield’s long self-explanation, in a quasi-psychiatric atmosphere (but in this case, told to “you” the reader, who Holden hopes will listen), is far more powerful and more lasting.

    Sabbath’s Theater, a National Book Award winner, was alleged to be Roth’s favorite novel, and has been mentioned favorably in obituaries as a tortured revelation on sexuality, but little else seems said of it. I must confess I was so little intrigued by it, I never finished reading it. On the other hand, The Counterlife seemed to me a masterful postmodernist work. It shifts and somersaults, almost effortlessly, from first person to third person, has a brother die in the opening pages, then revives him for a very different life as a committed Zionist living in Israel, shifts from New Jersey to Judea to Britain, and is constantly on the move, subtly, intellectually, and artistically. As it comments on itself and the self: “We are all the inventions of each other, everybody a conjuration conjuring up everyone else. We are all each other’s authors. It’s clever, confusing, demanding—and occasionally, wise.
    Very few Roth retrospectives or obituaries mention two of his earlier works, Our Gang and The Great American Novel. Perhaps these seemed liked great ideas at the time. The first is a satirical excoriation of the Nixon administration, stars Tricky as its central character, who reaches an apotheosis from the Book of Revelations at the end. The second is an attempt to make baseball into an epic subject. It’s obvious that Roth’s imagination and literary skills are tireless and formidable as well as mischievous and humorous. But he doesn’t always achieve success.
    For me its most cogent achievement of his American trilogy was American Pastoral with its central character, a blond Jew, achieving the American dream but losing his daughter to the nascent student rebellion and terrorism: it’s powerful in its emotional portrait of growth and suffering, and indefatigable and convincing and inventive in its description of the protagonist’s career as a glove manufacturer, a seemingly infertile field for literary imagination. And it echoes the Paradise Lost theme of Goodbye, Columbus.

As I contemplate Roth’s lengthy and varied and tireless literary career, I am in awe of its sheer magnitude and variety and also of his earnestness as a writer. He once described his creative process as writing continuously until he had 200 pages, then reading it over to decide whether it was worthwhile: he frequently threw this effort away. Unlike so many other great American writers of the 20th (and successive) century, unlike Bellow or Updike, he did not continue until near death or exhaustion, but self-consciously and publicly retired six years ago, and did not return for a swan song—because he felt his creative powers failing and didn’t want to offer shoddy material to a reading public. This speaks to a high notion of art and a profound professionalism.
    Still, I can’t help thinking about when I first read the second of Roth’s early works, Letting Go. At the time I found several characters compellingly realistic and unforgettable, and I was moved by his portraits of young children. I was much impressed by his acknowledged literary pedigree, by his allusions to and echoes of Henry James and Wallace Stevens. I thought, here was a writer with enormous resources and incredible native talent. Somehow, I’ve never felt he quite lived up to it, though he certainly never gave up and he wrote many powerful fictions. This is clearly now a very minority view. But I thought it was worth presenting, in case it might send readers back to Roth’s works.
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1. NY Times articles:

• “Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85” [Charles McGrath, May 22]
• “The Last Word: Philip Roth” [Erik Olsen & Mervyn Rothstein, May 23]
• “Philip Roth, a Born Spellbinder and Peerless Chronicler of Sex and Death” [Dwight Garner, May 23]
• “Philip Roth’s Earth-Moving Prose” [Brent Staples, May 23]
• “Philip Roth’s ‘Toxic Masculinity’” [Sam Lipsyte, May 23]

2. Terry Gross remembers Philip Roth: “Philip Roth: 'You Begin Every Book As An Amateur'” [May 23]

Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Price