Roth’s Complaint: Americans Have Forgotten Fiction

At 68, Philip Roth is at the phase of a successful writer’s life in which the awards stack up with alarming frequency--the surest sign, he says, that one’s career is finished--and he garners the kind of reverent praise that usually doesn’t come without hearses and incense.

But if he thought he would sit back earlier this month at the MacDowell arts colony in Peterborough, pick up another lifetime-achievement medal and bask in the kind of high-minded, man-of-letters accolades befitting someone of his stature, well, no wonder he was startled by how his friend and fellow author William Styron characterized Roth’s role in the pantheon of literature.

“If nothing else,” Styron boomed during the ceremony to award Roth the annual Edward MacDowell Medal, “Philip made the world safe for masturbation.”

Roth, more accustomed to the role of the startler than the startled, seemed caught momentarily by surprise. But of course Styron merely was voicing what comes most instantly to mind when the subject is Philip Roth.

Although he has written many and greater novels since 1969, the year he unleashed “Portnoy’s Complaint” on an unsuspecting public, he is associated most closely with that wild portrait of the boy who takes the matter of sex into, literally, his own hands.

More than 500 people flocked to the bucolic grounds of the colony here. Roth, who rarely makes public appearances or gives media interviews, was embraced with applause, cheers and even a standing ovation.

He is a thin and rather droll-looking man with eyebrows gone bushy to compensate for hair loss to the north and the expression of someone perpetually on the verge of being amused. Much like his books, he is both laugh-out-loud funny and serious.

During the few times he has spoken for public consumption in recent years, Roth has eulogized serious literature, offering a personal farewell to the days when fiction mattered to Americans in a way that he believes it no longer does. He continued that theme at MacDowell. In this setting, of course, he is preaching mostly to the converted. At colonies such as this, writers, musicians, painters and other artists are granted for several weeks a private studio and a break from the bustle of everyday life to tackle those unfinished novels, half-written poems, random notes in search of a symphony and glaringly bare canvasses.

Among previous artists-in-residence at MacDowell, established in 1907, are the likes of Willa Cather, Leonard Bernstein, Alice Walker, Aaron Copland, Gish Jen and Manil Suri, the University of Maryland Baltimore County professor who completed his acclaimed novel, “The Death of Vishnu,” while here.

But the devotion to serious art that the MacDowells represent, Roth fears, is increasingly a dying thing. The days when fiction had a central role in American culture, when novels piqued the public imagination, are long gone. “I think it’s been a sea change,” Roth said, comparing 1959, the year in which he published his first book, to now. “I think that, for good or bad, whether it was a delusion or not, there was a sense among us, to put it very squarely, that literature mattered. The society [today] is informally ignorant of this aspect of life: literature. It doesn’t care. It’s just a tiny distraction, and not an interesting one.”

Instead, Roth said, we have “the screen.”

“First the movie screen, then the TV screen, then the computer,” Roth said. “The human mind prefers the screen.”

While Roth continues to write and sell books that garner serious attention--the last 10 or so years have been astonishing in both output and ambition for him--no book has sold in the kind of numbers that “Portnoy’s Complaint” drew: more than 400,000 copies in its first year.

To read Roth’s more recent books against the backdrop of “Portnoy” is to read a writer at full rather than potential bloom. The latest novels have a sweep and breadth that “Portnoy” barely hinted at, with the trilogy of “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain” essentially offering readers nothing less than the story of America in the last half of the 20th century.

Roth has achieved “a kind of majestic equipoise” in his latest work, Styron told the MacDowell audience .

It is a depth that has been hard-won, Styron added, reminding the adoring crowd that Roth is not universally beloved: Some Jews have consider him self-loathing, and some women find his female characters demeaning.

The criticism was heightened by another phenomenon: His main characters borrow so heavily from Roth’s own biography--Jewish, male, from Newark, N.J.--that many readers assume the creator is the creation. At the time that “Portnoy’s Complaint” was scandalizing the world, for example, Roth was assumed to be Portnoy personified. Jacqueline Susann famously noted then that she’d love to meet Roth, but “I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.”

Roth has never wanted for critical acclaim. His 1959 debut, “Goodbye, Columbus” and “Five Short Stories,” won the National Book Award, the first of two. He has garnered a Pulitzer Prize and a couple of PEN/Faulkners as well, plus chatter that surely there’s a Nobel in his future.

He concedes to being a little tired now. But stay tuned.

“I’d like to think,” he said, “the peak is still to come.”

Jean Marbella is a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.