James Wood wrote: "More than any other post-war American writer, Roth wrote the self—the self was examined, cajoled, lampooned, fictionalized, ghosted, exalted, disgraced but above all constituted by and in writing. Maybe you have to go back to the very different Henry James to find an American novelist so purely a bundle of words, so restlessly and absolutely committed to the investigation and construction of life through language..

But that was

because he was often using language to push

through

language

Legacy and Influence

Roth's legacy in American fiction is profound; he is regarded as one of the greatest American novelists, influencing countless writers with his bold thematic explorations and stylistic innovations. Wood’s critiques have helped shape the understanding of Roth’s contributions to literature, framing him as a pivotal figure in discussions about narrative form and identity in modern writing

3

4

But to read Roth is to experience not only the fiction of fictionality but the reality of it, too—the great hunger artist feeds our hunger for the real: artistically, complexly, enigmatically, comically, passionately.

Legacy and Influence

Roth's legacy in American fiction is profound; he is regarded as one of the greatest American novelists, influencing countless writers with his bold thematic explorations and stylistic innovations. Wood’s critiques have helped shape the understanding of Roth’s contributions to literature, framing him as a pivotal figure in discussions about narrative form and identity in modern writing

3

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/8035/not-a-nice-boy/

More than any other postwar American novelist, Roth wrote the self—the self

was examined, cajoled, lampooned,

ctionalized, ghosted, exalted, disgraced,

but above all constituted by and in writing.

Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018)[1] was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity.[2] He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.[3][4] Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.

Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation.[5] He received the National Book Critics Circle award for *The Counterlife,* the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, *The Human Stain,* and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in Prague. In 2005, the Library of America began publishing his complete works, making him the second author so anthologized while still living, after Eudora Welty.[6] Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. James Wood wrote: "More than any other post-war American writer, Roth wrote the self—the self was examined, cajoled, lampooned, fictionalized, ghosted, exalted, disgraced but above all constituted by and in writing. Maybe you have to go back to the very different Henry James to find an American novelist so purely a bundle of words, so restlessly and absolutely committed to the investigation and construction of life through language... He would not cease from exploration; he could not cease, and the varieties of fiction existed for him to explore the varieties of experience."[7]

4

.

.

Do you have a Roth reader in mind when you write? 5 ROTH No. I occasionally have an anti-­‐Roth reader in mind. I think, “How he is going to hate this!” That can be just the encouragement I need

The second section is an imagined alternative history, in the style of The Ghost Writer and The Plot Against America, in which Kafka survives the war, travels to America, becomes Roth’s Hebrew school teacher, and is fixed up by Roth’s father with Roth’s spinster aunt. For a while, things go well in Newark for Kafka. He becomes a regular presence at family dinners. “Just look at him when he sits in that club chair,” exclaims Roth’s father, after one meal. “This is Franz Kafka’s dream come true.”

Roth describes his nonfiction as revealing himself “out from behind the disguises and inventions and artifices of the novel,” but he is never more himself than when he appears in disguise. The same is true of all great novelists.

Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-­‐imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend. The sly and cunning masquerade. Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all. His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down. You don’t necessarily, as a writer, have to abandon your biography completely to engage in an act of impersonation. It may be more intriguing when you don’t. You distort it, caricature it, parody it, you torture and subvert it, you exploit it—all to give the biography that dimension that will excite your verbal life. Millions of people do this all the time, of course, and not with the justification of making literature. They mean it

Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts. The question to ask about the writer isn’t “Why does he behave so badly?” but “What does he gain by wearing this mask?” I don’t admire the Genet that Genet presents as himself any more than I admire the unsavory Molloy impersonated by Beckett. I admire Genet because he writes books that won’t let me forget who that Genet is. When Rebecca West was writing about Augustine, she said that his Confessions was too subjectively true to be objectively true. I think this is so in the first-­‐person novels of Genet and Céline, as it is in Colette,

The experience of psychoanalysis was probably more useful to me as a writer than as a neurotic, although there may be a false distinction there.

The experience of psychoanalysis was probably more useful to me as a writer than as a neurotic, although there may be a false distinction there.

My idealism. My romanticism. My passion to capitalize the L in life. I wanted something difficult and dangerous to happen to me. I wanted a hard time. Well, I got it. I’d come from a small, safe, relatively happy provincial background—my Newark neighborhood in the thirties and forties was just a Jewish Terre Haute—and I’d absorbed, along with the ambition and drive, the fears and phobias of my generation of American Jewish children. In my early twenties, I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t afraid of all those things. It wasn’t a mistake to want to prove that, even though, after the ball was over, I was virtually unable to write for three or four years

. And that

wonderful prose, which became looser and simpler and more direct as Roth got

older, was merely the long music of the inquiry. Sometimes that prose could

look a bit ragged, as if the polished page had been turned over to pure,

unvarnished voice (though Roth's syntax is always complex). But that was

because he was often using language to push

through

language

You spoke of the last phase of writing a novel being a “crisis” in which you turn against the material and hate the work. Is there always this crisis, with every book? ROTH Always. Months of looking at the manuscript and saying, “This is wrong—but what’s wrong?” I ask myself, “If this book were a dream, it would be a dream of what?” But when I’m asking this I’m also trying to believe in what I’ve written, to forget that it’s writing and to say, “This has taken place,” even if it hasn’t. The idea is to perceive your invention as a reality that can be understood as a dream. The idea is to turn flesh and blood into literary characters and literary characters into flesh and blood.

Although Roth's writings often explored the Jewish experience in America, Roth rejected being labeled a Jewish American writer. "It's not a question that interests me. I know exactly what it means to be Jewish and it's really not interesting," he told the Guardian newspaper in 2005. "I'm an American."[32]

In May 2011, Roth was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction on the world stage, the fourth winner of the biennial prize.[60] One of the judges, Carmen Callil, a publisher of the feminist Virago house, withdrew in protest, referring to Roth's work as "Emperor's clothes". She said "he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe ... I don't rate him as a writer at all ..."

“What nonfiction I have written has arisen mainly from a provocation.” The original provocation came from Jewish readers offended by the publication of his story “Defender of the Faith” in The New Yorker in 1959. A prominent New York rabbi claimed that Roth had “earned the gratitude” of anti-Semites and demanded that the Anti-Defamation League “silence” him the way they did in medieval Europe. During the next few years Roth defended himself at synagogues, Yeshiva University, Jewish ladies’ groups, Jewish community centers, and symposia sponsored by B’nai B’rith, fielding accusations screamed from the audience.

He embarked on this public-speaking campaign for reasons he later called “stupid”: to defend himself and to explain himself to the paranoid assimilationists of his father’s generation who berated him for “informing” the goyim that some Jews might not be paragons of virtue and might even possess human qualities. “ ===Fiction is not written to affirm the principles and beliefs that everybody seems to hold,” he told his detractors, but his introductory lecture in literary theory failed to mollify them….. Writing in Haaretz, Gershom Scholem, perhaps unwittingly, echoed nearly verbatim the rabbi’s slander of a decade earlier, calling Portnoy “the book for which all anti-Semites have been praying.”

In a speech that recalls his childhood, he notes that fiction’s “ruthless intimacy” derives from the “scrupulous fidelity to the blizzard of specific data that is a personal life.”

“The intelligence of even the most intelligent novelist is often debased, or at the least distorted, when it’s isolated from the novel that embodies it,” he writes. “Detached from the fiction, a novelist’s wisdom can even be just so much talk.”

I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.

Roth wrote, "I wished to dazzle in my very own way and to dazzle myself no less than anyone else

To inspire himself to write, he recalled thinking, "All you have to do is sit down and work!

In Roth's fiction the question of authorship is intertwined with the theme of the idealistic, secular Jewish son who attempts to distance himself from Jewish customs and traditions, and from what he perceives as the sometimes suffocating influence of parents, rabbis, and other community leaders.[29] Roth's fiction has been described by critics as pervaded by "a kind of alienation that is enlivened and exacerbated by what binds it".[29]

Roth's first work, Goodbye, Columbus, was an irreverently humorous depiction of the life of middle-class Jewish Americans and received highly polarized reviews;[4] one reviewer found it infused with self-loathing. In response, Roth, in his 1963 essay "Writing About Jews" (collected in Reading Myself and Others), maintained that he wanted to explore the conflict between the call to Jewish solidarity and his desire to be free to question the values and morals of middle-class Jewish Americans uncertain of their identities in an era of cultural assimilation and upward social mobility:[30]

The cry 'Watch out for the goyim!' at times seems more the expression of an unconscious wish than of a warning: Oh that they were out there, so that we could be together here! A rumor of persecution, a taste of exile, might even bring with it the old world of feelings and habits—something to replace the new world of social accessibility and moral indifference, the world which tempts all our promiscuous instincts, and where one cannot always figure out what a Jew is that a Christian is not.

In the words of critic Hermione Lee:[31]

Philip Roth's fiction strains to shed the burden of Jewish traditions and proscriptions. ... The liberated Jewish consciousness, let loose into the disintegration of the American Dream, finds itself deracinated and homeless. American society and politics, by the late sixties, are a grotesque travesty of what Jewish immigrants had traveled towards: liberty, peace, security, a decent liberal democracy.

In The Plot Against America, the alternate history of the war years dramatizes the prevalence of anti-Semitism and racism in America at the time, despite the promotion of increasingly influential anti-racist ideals during the war. In his fiction Roth portrayed the 1940s, and the New Deal era of the 1930s that preceded it, as a heroic phase in American history.

---

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without dispair. Someday 111 put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three by-five cards on the wall now. "Fundamental accuracy of state ment is the ONE sole morality of writing." Ezra Pound. It is not everything by ANY means, but if a writer has "fundamental ac curacy of statement" going for him, he's at least on the right track. I have a

---

Writing about the latter, Hermione Lee points to the sense of disillusionment with "the American Dream" in Roth's fiction: "The mythic words on which Roth's generation was brought up—winning, patriotism, gamesmanship—are desanctified; greed, fear, racism, and political ambition are disclosed as the motive forces behind the 'all-American ideals'."[31]

This kind of pandering, Roth argues, is not merely a form of soft bigotry but bad fiction: clichéd, clumsy, cartoonish. Its aims are anti-literary. It grinds the complexity of a human life, with its moral contradictions and immoderate seethings, into a harmless pablum. It is a form, in other words, of propaganda. Certainly Jews could use some effective propaganda. But novelists shouldn’t feel forced to write it. As Roth puts it: “The novelist asks himself, ‘What do people think?’; the PR man asks, ‘What will people think?’”

The generation of Jews offended by Philip Roth is long gone, and its concerns may seem pitiful in retrospect, but Roth’s point holds. At a time of renewed sensitivity to questions of cultural identity, the biographical fallacy has returned in full force. Readers and critics, distraught at the nihilism of the current political nightmare, have sought comfort in fiction that affirms their principles and beliefs, fiction in which victimized peoples rise triumphant. They desire a new Exodus, new Leon Urises. And they will get them. But we should hope for something more. We should hope for new Philip Roths.

The threat continued in the 1990s, when Roth bemoaned to Ivan Klíma the obliterating influence of “that trivializer of everything, commercial television”; during the administration of George W. Bush (“we are ambushed…by the unpredictability that is history”); and in the final years of the Obama administration: “Very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps….” This year, in an e-mail published in The New Yorker, Roth worried about the newest manifestation of this threat: “It isn’t Trump as a character, a human type—the real-estate type, the callow and callous killer capitalist—that outstrips the imagination. It is Trump as President of the United States.”

Death and burial

Roth died at a Manhattan hospital of heart failure on May 22, 2018, at the age of 85.[46][14][47] Roth was buried at the Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where in 1999 he taught a class. He had originally planned to be buried next to his parents at the Gomel Chesed Cemetery in Newark, but changed his mind about 15 years before his death, in order to be buried close to where his friend Norman Manea is writer in residence,[48] and near other Jews "to whom he could talk".[49] Roth expressly banned any religious rituals from his funeral service, though it was noted that, the day after his burial, a pebble had been placed on top of his tombstone in accordance with Jewish tradition.[50]

.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/dec/14/fiction.philiproth

Joyce Carol Oates told The Guardian: "Philip Roth was a slightly older contemporary of mine. We had come of age in more or less the same repressive 50s era in America—formalist, ironic, 'Jamesian', a time of literary indirection and understatement, above all impersonality—as the high priest TS Eliot had preached: 'Poetry is an escape from personality.' Boldly, brilliantly, at times furiously, and with an unsparing sense of the ridiculous, Philip repudiated all that. He did revere Kafka—but Lenny Bruce as well. (In fact, the essential Roth is just that anomaly: Kafka riotously interpreted by Lenny Bruce.) But there was much more to Philip than furious rebellion. For at heart he was a true moralist, fired to root out hypocrisy and mendacity in public life as well as private. Few saw The Plot Against America as actual prophecy, but here we are. He will abide."[102]

After Roth's passing, Harold Bloom told the Library of America: "Philip Roth's departure is a dark day for me and for many others. His two greatest novels, American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater, have a controlled frenzy, a high imaginative ferocity, and a deep perception of America in the days of its decline. The Zuckerman tetralogy remains fully alive and relevant, and I should mention too the extraordinary invention of Operation Shylock, the astonishing achievement of The Counterlife, and the pungency of The Plot Against America. His My Life as a Man still haunts me. In one sense Philip Roth is the culmination of the unsolved riddle of Jewish literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The complex influences of Kafka and Freud and the malaise of American Jewish life produced in Philip a new kind of synthesis. Pynchon aside, he must be estimated as the major American novelist since Faulkner."[

ohn Berryman said that for a writer any ordeal that doesn’t kill him is terrific. The fact that his ordeal did finally kill him doesn’t make what he was saying wrong.

Philip Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was a prolific and influential American novelist whose career spanned over five decades. Born to Jewish parents in Newark, New Jersey, Roth emerged as a literary titan, known for his provocative exploration of American identity, Jewish-American life, and human sexuality[1][2].

Early Life and Career

Roth's ancestors were East European Jews who fled persecution, a history that would later influence his work[1]. He began his literary journey with the publication of "Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories" in 1959, which won the National Book Award in 1960[2]. This early success established Roth as a promising voice in American literature.

Major Works and Themes

Roth's oeuvre is characterized by its unflinching examination of the human condition, often through a Jewish-American lens. Some of his most notable works include:

• Portnoy's Complaint (1969): This controversial bestseller thrust Roth into the national spotlight with its explicit sexual content and exploration of Jewish identity[2].
• The Zuckerman Books: Featuring Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, these semi-autobiographical novels grapple with the complexities of being a Jewish artist in America[2].
• American Pastoral (1997): Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this novel delves into the disintegration of American ideals in the 1960s[4].

Writing Style and Philosophy

Roth was known for his incisive wit, narrative virtuosity, and willingness to blur the lines between fiction and autobiography. He often used his own experiences as a springboard for his fiction, leading to a complex interplay between his life and his art[3].

Awards and Recognition

Throughout his career, Roth received numerous accolades, including:

• Two National Book Awards
• Two National Book Critics Circle awards
• Three PEN/Faulkner Awards
• A Pulitzer Prize
• The Man Booker International Prize[4]

Legacy and Impact

Philip Roth's contribution to American literature is immeasurable. His unflinching exploration of controversial themes and his masterful prose have secured his place in the pantheon of great American writers. As he once said, "The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress"[3], a testament to his dedication to his craft.

Notable Quotes

Roth's works are replete with insightful and often provocative quotes that reflect his sharp wit and keen observations:

1. "The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open."[5]
2. "I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't."[6]
3. "Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts."[3]
4. "I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear."[6]
5. "Writing is frustration – it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time."[3]

These quotes encapsulate Roth's complex views on love, identity, literature, and the writing process, offering a glimpse into the mind of one of America's most celebrated authors.

Citations: [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53404228-philip-roth [2] https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/english-literature/american-literature/philip-roth/ [3] https://www.writermag.com/blog/philip-roth-quotes/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Roth:_The_Biography [5] https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/463.Philip_Roth [6] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Philip_Roth [7] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/philip-roth-blake-bailey-jesse-tisch [8] https://www.thoughtco.com/biography-of-philip-roth-american-novelist-4800328 [9] https://www.pastemagazine.com/books/philip-roth/the-10-most-uplifting-philip-roth-quotes [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Roth

https://www.philiprothsociety.org/biography

—

Philip Roth Biography Courtesy of Salem Press, a Division of EBSCO Publishing Originally published in Critical Insights: Philip Roth, Edited by Aimee Pozorski (2013)   Roth, Philip   Mar. 19, 1933- Writer   Philip Roth first achieved prominence in 1959 with the publication of Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, for which he won the National Book Award. Delineating the conflict between traditional and contemporary morals as manifested in a young, Jewish American man’s search for identity, the title novella revived an enduring controversy (which had begun two years earlier with Roth’s first New Yorker story) over whether his satirical treatment of Jewish themes constituted anti- Semitism. That controversy reached a fever pitch with his novel Portnoy’s Complaint, which created a sensation in 1969 because of its explicit recounting of a young lawyer’s sexual autobiography, consisting largely of compulsive attempts to free himself from the strict confines of his Jewish upbringing through incessant masturbation and sexual conquest. Since then, Roth’s output has ranged from wild comedy and political satire to examinations of his role as a writer and son and metafictional explorations of the relationship between art and life, fiction and reality, imagination and fact; or, as he has put it, the “relationship between the written and the unwritten world.” In an interview with Mervyn Rothstein for the New York Times (August 1, 1985), Roth identified his primary theme as “the tension between license and restraint, . . . a struggle between the hunger for personal liberty and the forces of inhibition.”   In their late 50s and 60s, some novelists begin to rest on their laurels, but Philip Roth instead produced some of his best works. Among these were the memoir Patrimony (1991), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), and Sabbath’s Theater (1995), which won the National Book Award for fiction. Roth’s trilogy of modern American life began in 1997 with American Pastoral, which covers the Vietnam era; continued in 1998 with I Married a Communist, a look at the Red Scare of the 1950s; and concluded in 2000 with The Human Stain, a critique of America’s obsession with moralizing and political correctness. For American Pastoral he earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Over the next decade Roth’s published works included The Dying Animal (2001), The Plot Against America (2004), Everyman (2006), Exit Ghost (2007), and Indignation (2008).   Philip Milton Roth was born on March 19, 1933 to Herman Roth and Bess (Finkel) Roth in Newark, New Jersey, where he and his older brother, Sandy, grew up. His father, the American-born son of Jewish immigrants from the eastern European region of Galicia (currently occupied by Poland and Ukraine), whose shoe-store business had gone bankrupt during the Depression, was an insurance salesman who had reached the echelons of management despite the openly anti-Semitic sentiments of his superiors. Like his father, Philip Roth faced similar prejudices that marred his otherwise “intensely secure and protected” childhood. His summer vacations at Bradley Beach on the New Jersey shore were sometimes spoiled by gang attacks against Jews, and, even at the almost entirely Jewish Weequahic High School, Roth was subjected to violence inflicted by bullies from neighboring, non-Jewish schools. At the age of 12, he pledged that when he grew up he would “oppose the injustices wreaked by the violent and the privileged by becoming a lawyer for the underdog.” His other passion during his youth was baseball, which, he has written, offered him “membership in a great secular nationalistic church from which nobody had ever seemed to suggest that Jews should be excluded.”   From 1950, when he graduated from high school, to 1951 Roth attended the Newark extension of Rutgers University before transferring to Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to escape the “provincialism” of Newark and discover “the rest of America.” But he discovered instead that Bucknell’s “respectable Christian atmosphere [was] hardly less constraining than [his] own particular Jewish upbringing.” While at Bucknell, Roth edited the literary magazine, appeared in student plays, and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After graduating magna cum laude with a B.A. degree in English in 1954, he obtained an M.A. degree in English from the University of Chicago the following year. Roth then moved to Washington, D.C., where he served briefly in the U.S. Army before he was discharged due to a back injury. Upon returning to the University of Chicago in 1956, he began teaching a full schedule of freshman composition while working toward a doctorate degree (a goal that he abandoned in the first quarter). During Roth’s two-year stint as an English instructor at the University of Chicago, he continued to write short fiction, which he had begun doing at least as early as 1955. Among those who read his work at that time was fellow writer Saul Bellow, who recalled that Roth’s stories “showed a wonderful wit and great pace.” Roth, however, has said that he did not initially take his own writing seriously because “everybody studying English wrote stories.”   But Roth’s stories often proved to be of award-winning caliber, enabling him to pursue writing and teaching full-time. After serving for a brief period as a reviewer of television and film for the New Republic, a renowned liberal weekly journal of opinion, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus in 1959. In the title novella, the conflicting values of the impoverished, urban Neil Klugman and the affluent Brenda Patimkin, a Jewish- American “princess” whose suburban, upper-middle-class lifestyle is satirized mercilessly, doom the couple’s relationship. In the opinion of most critics, the book showed great promise and signaled the arrival of an important new writer. “A brilliant new talent,” Arnold Dolin wrote for the Saturday Review (May 16, 1959), “Philip Roth has looked penetratingly into the heart of the American Jew who faces the loss of his identity. The conflict involved in this choice between two worlds provides the focal point of drama for a memorable collection of short stories.”   The earlier publication of one of the stories in Goodbye, Columbus, “Defender of the Faith,” which appeared in the New Yorker in April 1957, had provoked a barrage of charges that Roth’s attitude toward his Jewish subjects was anti-Semitic, a controversy that was revived by his unflattering portrayal of the consumerist lifestyle of the Patimkins, which prompted one rabbi to accuse him of presenting “a distorted image of the basic values of Orthodox Judaism.” Nevertheless, the majority of critics were impressed by Goodbye, Columbus, which earned Roth a National Book Award, an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a Daroff Award from the Jewish Book Council of America, and a Guggenheim fellowship that enabled him to travel to Rome. In 1960 he began a two-year stint as a visiting lecturer at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, followed by two years as a writer-in-residence at Princeton University in New Jersey.   Roth’s next two books are now generally considered minor works. Letting Go (1962), his first full-length novel, focused on the ethical dilemmas of a young Jewish academic at the University of Chicago. Despite the “sharply observant” qualities of Roth’s prose that were unfailingly mentioned by reviewers, Letting Go was invariably faulted for its sprawling length and its diffusiveness. When She Was Good (1967), which Roth once referred to simply as his “book with no Jews,” is also his only novel to feature a female protagonist. Critics were sharply divided over its merits. Josh Greenfeld, writing for Book Week (June 4, 1967), ranked When She Was Good “among the few novels written about America since World War II that may still be worth reading 25 years from now,” but a reviewer for Time (June 9, 1967) described the female heroine as “theatrically unsatisfying and an ear-jarring bore.” Saul Maloff, whose review for Newsweek (June 12, 1967) occupied a middle ground, noted: “With unerring fidelity, [Roth] records the flat surface of provincial American life, the look and feel and sound of it–and then penetrates it to the cesspool of its invisible dynamisms. Beneath the good, and impelling it, he says, lies the horrid.”   The period between 1962 and 1967, during which Roth lived in New York City and underwent psychoanalysis, marked the longest hiatus in his productivity that he had ever experienced. He characterized that period as one of “literary uncertainty,” adding, “I didn’t know what the hell to do. What do I write about? Do I pursue these Jewish subjects any further or get rid of them? . . . It was a period of debilitating disorder in my young life.” In an interview with Hermione Lee for the Paris Review (Summer 1983-Winter 1984), Roth revealed how his disastrous marriage in 1959 to the former Margaret Martinson Williams (from whom he was legally separated in 1963 and who died in an automobile accident in 1968) had exhausted his emotional and financial resources. “I needed [analysis],” he said, “primarily to prevent me from going out and committing murder because of the alimony and court costs incurred for having served two years in a childless marriage. The image that teased me during those years was of a train that had been shunted onto the wrong track. In my early twenties I had been zipping right along there, you know–on schedule, express stops only, final destination clearly in mind; and then suddenly I was on the wrong track, speeding off into the wilds. I’d ask myself, ‘How the hell do you get this thing back on the right track?’ Well, you can’t. I’ve continued to be surprised, over the years, whenever I discover myself, late at night, pulling into the wrong station.”   Roth restored his career during the late 1960s, when he began teaching literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained on the faculty for about 11 years. The 1969 feature film adaptation of Goodbye, Columbus, starring Ali MacGraw and Richard Benjamin, coincided with the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, which quickly sold 393,000 copies in hardcover. Roth became an instant celebrity and garnered publicity, not only due to the crudity of his humor, which offended some (the book was banned in Australia) and delighted others, but also because the intimate nature of Portnoy’s confessional monologue to his psychoanalyst led to considerable prurient speculation about Roth’s own personal life. The inordinate amount of attention focused on Roth compelled him to move out of New York City to the Yaddo Artist Colony, located in Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York.   Literary critics, however, were more enthusiastic in their assessment of Portnoy’s Complaint than the gossipmongers on the television talk-show circuit. Granville Hicks, writing for the Saturday Review (February 22, 1969), described Portnoy’s Complaint as ”something very much like a masterpiece,” while John Greenfeld, writing for the New York Times Book Review (February 23, 1969), called it a “deliciously funny book, absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious.” Those offended by the book included anti-obscenity crusaders as well as some members of the Jewish community, who felt that the novel was tinged with anti-Semitism. “The charges were several,” Roth recalled in an interview with Curt Suplee for the Washington Post (October 30, 1983), “and in defense of my accusers, it was only the lunatic fringe who said I was anti-Semitic. The stronger case was that I was lending fuel to the fires of anti-Semites. . . . I don’t think it’s a matter of a right position or a wrong position. It’s two right positions colliding.”   Ironically, his critics may have unwittingly played a part in the genesis of Portnoy’s Complaint, as Roth explained in his book Reading Myself and Others (1975), by prompting him to pursue the goal “of becoming the writer some Jewish critics had been telling [him he] was all along: irresponsible, conscienceless, unserious.” The uproar over Portnoy’s Complaint did not impede Roth’s election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1970.   During the early 1970s Roth wrote a series of entirely different satirical novels that received mixed reaction and were generally perceived as being less impressive than his other books. Our Gang (1971), a parody on the Richard M. Nixon administration that featured a fictional U.S. president named Tricky E. Dixon, was described by Dwight MacDonald for the New York Times Book Review (November 7, 1971) as “farfetched, unfair, tasteless, disturbing, logical, coarse, and very funny. . . . In short, a masterpiece.” Explaining his chosen target, Roth said, “One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”   In The Breast (1972), Professor David Kepesh has been transformed into a six-foot-tall mammary gland and attempts to reconcile his intellectual and sexual selves. Although he does not succeed completely, his efforts bring him invaluable insights into how to cope with a self-image that is at war with his impulses. Roth once referred to Kepesh as the “first heroic character” he had been able to portray because he went further than other Rothian protagonists in passing through “the barrier that forms one boundary of the individual’s identity and experience: that barrier of personal inhibition, ethical restraint, and plain old conformism and fear, beyond which lies the moral and psychological unknown.” (Kepesh reappears, as a professor who moves from the alternate gratification of his mental and physical selves to the achievement of a more integrated way of being, in The Professor of Desire [1977].) “The Breast heaves with weighty theme-ideas,” Bruce Allen wrote for the Library Journal (October 1, 1972), “but it yields nothing firm, lacking any consistent interplay between the serious and the grotesque.”   After penning the ironically titled The Great American Novel (1973), a baseball satire that one critic dismissed as “a great American bore that’s impossible not to put down shortly after you pick it up,” Roth authored what many consider his finest novel: My Life as a Man (1974). Its multilayered story centers on the novelist Peter Tarnopol’s attempts to solve his dilemmas by writing “Useful Fictions” about Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish writer whose life resembles his own. Writing for Newsweek (June 3, 1974), Peter S. Prescott referred to My Life as a Man as “Roth’s best novel” and “his most complex and most ambitious.”   Zuckerman became a recurring character who appeared in several of Roth’s subsequent novels. In The Ghost Writer (1979), a young Zuckerman visits the home of his literary mentor, where he meets a mysterious guest named Amy Belette whom he believes is Anne Frank resurrected. In a review for the Washington Post (September 2, 1979), Jonathan Penner wrote that The Ghost Writer “provides further evidence that [Roth] can do practically anything with fiction. His narrative power . . . is superb.” Zuckerman Unbound (1981) follows Zuckerman as he achieves notoriety with his scandalous novel “Carnovsky” and falls victim to his own bad reputation, which ultimately destroys his love life and his relations with his family. In The Anatomy Lesson (1983), Zuckerman, now stricken with inexplicable neck and shoulder pain and mourning the loss of his mother and the devolution of his hometown, Newark, decides to abandon writing and become a doctor. Reviewing it for the New Yorker (November 7, 1983), John Updike discovered that “materials one might have thought exhausted by Roth’s previous novelistic explorations, inflammations one might have thought long soothed, burn hotter than ever; the central howl unrolls with a mediated savagery both fascinating and repellent, self-indulgent yet somehow sterling, adamant, pure, in the style of high modernism, that bewitchment to all the art-stricken young of the 1950s.”   The three novels (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson) were published in one volume in 1985 entitled Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and an Epilogue. Although the epilogue, The Prague Orgy, which was considered by many critics to be the best section of the volume, seemed to mark the end of the Zuckerman cycle, Roth resurrected his hero yet again for The Counterlife (1986), a stand-alone novel for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. William H. Gass declared The Counterlife “a triumph” in his assessment of the novel for the New York Times Book Review (January 4, 1987) and concluded that it “constitutes a fulfillment of tendencies, a successful integration of themes, and the final working through of obsessions that have previously troubled if not marred his work.” Other reviewers were critical of the book’s nonlinear storytelling approach. Among the dissenters was Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who wrote for the New York Times (December 29, 1986): “We become so aware of the narrative’s duplicity that all that is left to us is the burden of the author’s self-consciousness as an artist and a Jew. It’s like being trapped between two fun-house mirrors that reflect each other’s distortions unto a point that vanishes into absurdity.”   During his interview with Curt Suplee for the Washington Post, Roth defined the Zuckerman novels as “hypothetical autobiographies. It’s very complicated. I have no great brief to make for my life as lived. In fact, it’s basically sitting in a chair writing books. It’s not very eventful. I don’t know what I am–I’m a person who writes. But what excites my verbal life is imagining what I might be, what might befall someone like myself; imagining what kind of person I would be if I were a person. I’m really quite content to be what I am. I never entertained the idea of being a doctor in my life, but writing this book I had to. I don’t have to do these things–I have people do them for me.”   After writing so many “hypothetical autobiographies,” Roth was compelled to pen The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988). A memoir of his first 36 years, The Facts began as a therapeutic exercise to help him recover from the deep depression he had fallen into after minor knee surgery in 1987. For three months Roth suffered from hallucinations, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts, and other debilitating symptoms, due to the interaction of two drugs he was taking as a result of the surgery. “I thought, something is happening to me; I’ve got to fight my way out of it,” he told Stephen Schiff for Vanity Fair (April 1990). “And I would try to write down who I was, to remember who I was.” In a review of The Facts for USA Today (September 2, 1988), William H. Pritchard demurred that “novelists, even when they try to play it straight and pass along naked truths about themselves, clothe those truths in sentences that construct an imagined self instead of handing it over unaltered.” In reply to such comments, Roth told Mervyn Rothstein, “I called the book The Facts, not ‘The Dirt.’ I didn’t write ‘The Dirt.’ That’s another book.”   In the early 1990s Roth authored books that were strikingly dissimilar in tone, style, and subject. Deception (1990) centered on a 50-year-old married novelist–also named Philip–who records the dialogue between himself and his younger lover, who is also married. The novelist Fay Weldon remarked that Deception “reads like a brilliant radio play for a minority audience” in her article for the New York Times Book Review (March 11, 1990), while Peter S. Prescott wrote for Newsweek (March 26, 1990) that Roth was merely “revving his motor again, his gearshift still stuck in neutral.”   In contrast, Patrimony: A True Story (1991), which focused on the life and death of Herman Roth, who had died at 86 from a brain tumor in October 1989, was unanimously admired for its “deeply resonant” portrayal of the author’s father. “In celebrating his father,” R. Z. Sheppard wrote for Time (January 21, 1991), “and by implication the source of his own character, Roth has not strayed from the long path he has cut for himself: to dramatize the adventure of assimilation in all its anxiety, humor, and fertile illusions. As a writer and a son, he has now dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.” In 1991 Roth was awarded the National Arts Club’s Medal of Honor for Literature for the body of his work.   Operation Shylock (1993), which Roth presented as a quasi-autobiographical work, centered on two characters both named Philip Roth: the narrator–an author suffering from depression who travels to Israel to attend the trial of a war criminal; and a spy for an Israeli intelligence agency who is posing as the author. When the “real” Roth confronts his double, the two begin arguing fiercely about everything from the Holocaust to the slippery slope of politics in the Middle East. (Roth’s publisher and reviewers called it a work of fiction, but Roth himself insisted that the story was true, despite many critics questioning the likelihood that Roth had been recruited by the Mossad.) The novel had a mixed reception from the critics. Paul Gray wrote in Time (March 8, 1993): “Roth has not riffed with quite this comic abandon since Portnoy’s Complaint. And the social and historical range of Operation Shylock is broader than anything the author has attempted before.” In his review for Newsweek (March 8, 1993), Malcolm Jones wrote, however: “If [Roth] intended to replicate the ironic contradictions in the Mideast, he succeeded all too well, exhausting our patience in the bargain. Our lasting impression is of a prodigally gifted writer searching for evermore complicated and arcane ways to keep himself amused.” Roth’s next novel, Sabbath’s Theater (1995), revolved around Mickey Sabbath, a once-notorious New York street performer, now cheating on his second wife, Roseanna, with a Croatian immigrant named Drenka. Following Drenka’s death from ovarian cancer, the embittered Sabbath reminisces about their relationship in order to better understand his own wild life. In a review for the New York Times (August 22, 1995), Michiko Kakutani called the book “distasteful and disingenuous,” and also added that “Because Mr. Roth never offers much insight into Sabbath’s heart, because he suggests that Sabbath is virtually incapable of sincerity, that even his post-Drenka breakdown may be an act of manipulation . . . the reader is hard pressed to tolerate, much less sympathize with, Sabbath.” On the other hand, William H. Pritchard for the New York Times Book Review (September 10, 1995) touted Sabbath’s Theater as Roth’s “richest, most rewarding novel.”For his effort Roth won the 1995 National Book Award for fiction.   In 1997 Roth authored American Pastoral, the first book in a trilogy of postwar American life. Narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, the story, which is set during the Vietnam era, recounts the rise and fall of Seymour Irving Levov, known as “the Swede” for his Aryan good looks. Though Jewish, Levov is not as alienated as many of Roth’s other Jewish characters; in fact, he becomes first a commanding athlete and later a successful husband and father–someone truly living the dream of the 1950s by assimilating completely into American life. American Pastoral earned stellar reviews and won Roth the Pulitzer Prize. In America (August 30-September 6, 1997), Sylvia Barack Fishman remarked: “Philip Roth . . . has written a powerful, painful and deeply moving masterpiece that will surprise many readers familiar with his 22 earlier books.” Mayer Schiller opined for the National Review (June 16, 1997) that American Pastoral “has everything one could want in a novel. Its rapid-fire insights into the human condition tumble down upon each other. Yet, they are delivered with just the right degree of irony, ambiguity, and humble humor.”   I Married a Communist (1998), the second volume in Roth’s trilogy, did not fare as well with the critics. Again narrated by Zuckerman, as well as his 90-year-old high-school teacher, Murray Ringold, the novel relates the story of Ringold’s brother Ira, a radio star known as Iron Rinn–who converts to communism during World War II and is later vilified for his beliefs. Betrayed by his wife, Eve, who writes a tell-all memoir about her life with him, Iron Rinn is devastated by the same anti-communist forces that brought down so many Americans in the 1950s. Reviewing I Married a Communist for the New York Times (October 8, 1998), Michiko Kakutani described it as “a wildly uneven novel that feels both unfinished and overstuffed, a novel that veers unsteadily between sincerity and slapstick, heartfelt melancholy and cavalier manipulation.” Robert Kelly, writing for the New York Times Book Review (October 11, 1998), was far more complimentary, calling the book “a gripping novel.” He continued: “This powerful novel leaves me haunted by the isolation in which each character, not just Ira, stands in history. The book’s final page tells of the stars, whose brilliance is matched only by their apartness. A classic image fit to close this new novel by one of the real ones.”   The final installment of the trilogy, The Human Stain (2000), was a portrait of contemporary American angst. The novel looks at the decline of common sense and civility with regard to sex and privacy in the United States. With Nathan Zuckerman serving as the narrator once again, The Human Stain chronicles the life of Coleman Silk, a black professor who has been passing for white for decades. Lorrie Moore, writing for the New York Times Book Review (May 7, 2000), called The Human Stain “an astonishing, uneven and often very beautiful book.” In a review for Time (May 8, 2000), R. Z. Sheppard was equally laudatory, noting: “At 67, Roth has not lost one ampere of his power to rile and surprise. . . . Most novelists wouldn’t or couldn’t handle the variety of elements that Roth does here. Few have his radical imagination and technical mastery. Fewer still have his daring.”   With The Dying Animal (2001), Roth revived the character of David Kepesh, who was last seen in the 1977 book The Professor of Desire. Though now an old man, Kepesh continues his conquest of young female students. The book was not well received by critics, despite its titillating subject matter. Keith Gessen wrote for the Nation (June 11, 2001): “It seems obvious that at this point Roth can do little with sex that he hasn’t done already (though he tries in The Dying Animal, he tries). This continued fixation is fictionally fallow. . . . Since sex is, in this view, overdetermined, it’s like writing about gravity.” In The Plot Against America (2004), Roth presents an alternate history in which the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, a notorious anti-Semite in real life, is voted to the Republican Party’s presidential ticket and then into the White House, unseating Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941. Instead of joining the Allies in World War II, Lindbergh signs a pact with Hitler and begins to institute anti-Jewish policies. The novel, narrated by a seven-year-old boy named Philip Roth whose family and home life mirror the author’s own, earned mixed reviews. Jennifer Reese wrote for Entertainment Weekly (October 8, 2004), “With this fascinating, fertile material, Roth has spun an unconvincing fantasy that falls far short of his finest work. While his depictions of the Roth family’s idyllic pre-Lindbergh existence (and Philip’s vibrant, eccentric inner life) are detailed and persuasive, he has set them against a cardboard backdrop of a fatally underimagined alternative America.” Despite such mixed reviews, the book won a number of accolades, among them the 2005 Sidewise Award for alternate history and the 2005 James Fenimore Cooper Prize in the category of best historical fiction.   Roth chose death as the focus of his 2006 novel, Everyman, after witnessing many of his friends grow old and die. The story concerns the life, slow decay, and eventual death of the unnamed main character. The events of his life appear out of sequence and are presented as increasingly common and universal the narrator grows older. Describing Everyman as “essentially a medical biography,” James Poniewozik wrote for Time (May 15, 2006), “It is to Roth’s credit that he cannot quite bring himself to write a book as dull and flat as Everyman‘s concept seems to demand. His style repeatedly breaks its leash, as at the funeral, when the protagonist’s brother gives a moving eulogy and his estranged son struggles violently against unbidden grief.” That book won him a 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award, making him the award’s only three-time winner. Roth was also honored with a PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement and a 2007 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2007 Roth published Exit Ghost, the ninth book narrated by Zuckerman, which finds Roth’s alter-ego, now aged 71, in search of a New York specialist to perform surgery to treat his incontinence and impotence, and lusting after a well-endowed 30-year-old short-story writer.   In 2008 Roth published Indignation, a novel whose main character, the Newark-born Marcus Messner, flees his overprotective father during the Korean War and transfers to Winesburg College, in Ohio, in an effort to emulate the preppy students he sees on the school’s catalogue cover. Characterized by reviewer Rita D. Jacobs for World Literature Today (November 1, 2008) as a return to “his roots” the book examines the familiar subjects of identity, sex, and death. In February 2009 Houghton Mifflin announced the expected publication dates for Roth’s next two novels. “The Humbling” is scheduled to be published in the fall of 2009 and will explore the unexpected sexual awakening of an aging stage actor; and “Nemesis,” which has a 2010 publication date, will recount a polio epidemic in World War II-era Newark.   Several of Roth’s books have been adapted as films, including The Human Stain (2003) and Elegy (2007), which was based on The Dying Animal. He is the only author whose novels appeared more than twice on the 2006 New York Times Book Review list of the most important works of American literature in the last quarter century, which was based on surveys of writers, critics, editors, and others in the literary world. Among the 22 books featured on that list, six were penned by Roth: American Pastoral, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath’s Theater, The Plot Against America, and The Human Stain. Roth was previously married to the distinguished British actress Claire Bloom. The couple, who wed in 1990, had first met in 1965 when they were both otherwise attached and had lived together since 1976. They separated after four years of marriage. In 1996 Bloom published her autobiography, Leaving a Doll’s House, in which she detailed her turbulent relationship with Roth. (Eve, the traitorous wife in I Married a Communist, was generally thought by critics to be based on Bloom.) Since 1973 Roth has lived on his 40-acre farm in northwestern Connecticut.

Roth died of heart failure at the age of 85 on May 22, 2018 in Manhattan. He is buried at Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.   Suggested Reading: New York Oct. 1, 2007; New Yorker p96 Sep. 20, 2004; Time p59 May 15, 2006; World Literature Today p66 Nov. 1, 2008   Selected Works: Goodbye, Columbus, 1959; Letting Go, 1962; When She Was Good, 1967; Portnoy’s Complaint, 1969; Our Gang, 1971; The Great American Novel, 1973; My Life as a Man, 1974; The Professor of Desire, 1977; The Ghost Writer, 1979; Zuckerman Unbound, 1981; The Anatomy Lesson, 1983; The Counterlife, 1986; The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, 1988; Deception: A Novel, 1990; Patrimony: A True Story, 1991; Operation Shylock: A Confession, 1993; Sabbath’s Theater, 1995; American Pastoral, 1997; I Married a Communist, 1998; The Human Stain, 2000; The Dying Animal, 2001; The Plot Against America, 2004; Everyman, 2006; Exit Ghost, 2007; Indignation, 2008

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Another day, another award

https://www.bookcritics.org/2011/05/12/celebrating-philip-roth-3-a-timeline-in-reviews/

Celebrating Philip Roth #3: A Timeline in Reviews - National Book Critics Circle