Appreciation: Philip Roth, a provocateur whose candor seared even as it reflected the American story
Philip Roth was the first writer I encountered who reflected my image, or that of my family, back from the page.
At this point, on the day after his death Tuesday evening from congestive heart failure in a Manhattan hospital at age 85 â nearly six decades after his debut âGoodbye, Columbusâ won a 1960 National Book Award â such an observation may seem like a commonplace. Letâs not forget, however, the culture from which Roth emerged and started writing, that of American (or more accurately, Northeastern) urban Jewry in the years before and after World War II.
This world was intact even in the early 1970s, when I came upon his novel âPortnoyâs Complaintâ as a 12-year-old. When we think about that book, we think about the sex, all that adolescent lust and obsession; the scene in which the narrator, Alexander Portnoy, uses a piece of liver as a masturbation aid is a particularly memorable one.
But even more, I was drawn to the set pieces, especially those that took place at home. In his stoic father and his mother, who harangued and lectured like a drill sergeant, I recognized not my parents but their parents, the long line of Jewish immigration and assimilation, the fabric of their social anxiety.
âOpen your mouth,â Portnoyâs mother demanded. âWhy is your throat red? Do you have a headache youâre not telling me about? ⊠I donât want you running around, and thatâs final. Or eating hamburgers out. Or mayonnaise. Or chopped liver. Or tuna. Not everybody is careful the way your mother is about spoilage.â
Roth had complicated feelings about âPortnoyâs Complaint,â which made him notorious after it was published in 1969. âI donât have any ambivalence about it,â he told me, during a 2006 interview. âBut ⊠if you take that book out, my whole career would seem different. ⊠Iâm not sorry I wrote it. Iâm not sorry I published it. But itâs influenced virtually everything anybodyâs ever thought about my work.â
In some sense, Roth was right in that assessment, although itâs impossible to imagine his body of work without the novel; itâs a spindle around which much of the rest revolves. âZuckerman Unboundâ (1981), the second volume in the âZuckerman Trilogy,â uses a âPortnoyâ-esque novel called âCarnovsky,â written by Rothâs alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, as its inciting incident. The 1995 novel âSabbathâs Theaterâ takes the earlier workâs âbrutality,â to use Rothâs word, and supercharges it, sexually and otherwise.
At the same time, Roth was a provocateur from the beginning, in the sense that all essential artists are. His story âDefender of the Faithâ ignited a firestorm when it was published in the New Yorker in March 1959 for its portrayal of a Jewish soldier using his heritage to seek special treatment from a sergeant who is also a Jew.
âWhat is being done to silence this man?â a rabbi wrote of Roth in response. Three years later, he was accosted by audience members at New Yorkâs Yeshiva University.
âMr. Roth,â one asked, âwould you write the same stories youâve written if you were living in Nazi Germany?â
The controversy is revisited in the first Zuckerman book, âThe Ghost Writerâ (1979), which also imagines the possibility that Anne Frank did not die at Bergen-Belsen but survived the Holocaust.
What he was investigating in such works, Roth insisted, was âthe unforeseen consequence of art.â Certainly, itâs an issue that confounds Zuckerman, who became a fixture in his work. Between 1979 and 2007, Roth published nine novels in which the character appeared. He also invoked him in his first work of narrative nonfiction, âThe Factsâ (1988), which begins with a letter to Zuckerman and ends with his response.
âDear Roth,â he cautions. âIâve read the manuscript twice. Here is the candor you ask for. Donât publish â you are far better off writing about me than âaccuratelyâ reporting your own life.â
If, on the one hand, the device reads as a bit of postmodern gamesmanship, Roth was absolutely serious about the implications of narrative. In novels such as âOperation Shylockâ (subtitled âA Confessionâ) or âThe Plot Against America,â which imagined fascism coming to the United States with the election of Charles Lindbergh as president in 1940, he used himself, or a fictionalized version, as a central character. In âThe Counterlifeâ â which is, I think, his most brilliant novel â he killed off Zuckerman and brought him back to life.
These strategies, he argued, were not experimental but practical. He built âThe Plot Against Americaâ around his own family in 1940s Newark, he once said, because he âwanted it to affect a family, but it seemed to me that if I began to invent other people, Iâd get all muddled up. So I told myself the simplest thing to do, and perhaps the best thing to do, was to change just one thing â that is, the result of the 1940 election. Have Lindbergh run and win. But leave everything else in place.â
âThe Plot Against Americaâ was the culmination of a late, great run in Rothâs career: eight big novels published between 1993 and 2004, including âSabbathâs Theaterâ and âAmerican Pastoral,â which won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, all taking on political or cultural concerns. This was a shift for Roth, whose 1961 essay âWriting American Fictionâ lamented the novelistâs inability to out-imagine world events. âThe actuality,â he wrote there, âis continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures daily that are the envy of any novelist.â
If Roth, however, spent the 1960s and â70s gazing inward, he was also looking outward, to the world. In 1971, he followed âPortnoyâs Complaintâ with âOur Gang,â a vicious parody, released a year before Watergate, about a president named Trick E. Dixon, who gins up a war with Denmark so he can give the unborn the vote. Five years later, he created the book series âWriters From the Other Europe,â which introduced Eastern European authors such as Tadeusz Borowski, Bruno Schulz and Milan Kundera to readers in the West.
Even âThe Counterlife,â for all its turns of plot and character, took place, in part, in Israel, where âOperation Shylockâ is also set. âPart of it,â Roth told me in 2004, âis a function of age. When youâre a young man, if youâre looking back, youâre looking back to your childhood. Otherwise, you want to write about whatâs going on around you. But at a certain age, I was able to look back at decades, and see that I had lived through whatâs called American history.â
Roth won nearly every major literary prize except the Nobel, which became a source of consternation to him. âI suspect theyâre a little bit provincial,â he said in 2013, referring to the Swedish Academy.
He was also criticized â deservedly so â for the portrayal of women in his books. In âExit, Ghostâ (2007), the last of the Zuckerman novels, the character, now in his 70s, becomes infatuated with a younger woman, objectifying her as if he were young Portnoy, a horny adolescent come to life. A similar sensibility marks his 1990 novel âDeception,â which is constructed as a dialogue between an older man and his younger lover and remains his most egregious book.
At the same time â and not to dismiss or minimize these failings â we are who we are and we write, as we must, from our own perspectives, for good and also for ill. What Roth brought to the page was a visceral honesty, an expression of the narrative of consciousness, which in the end is all we ever have to know.
I have never stopped thinking of his reflections on mortality: âThe ceaseless perishing,â he laments in âThe Human Stain.â âWhat an idea! What maniac conceived it?â Or this, the end of âSabbathâs Theaterâ: âAnd he couldnât do it. He could not ⊠die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.â
And yet, he did die, as we all will: It is the human condition, yes, the human stain. What other choice do we have?
âYou fight your superficiality, your shallowness,â he wrote in âAmerican Pastoral,â âso as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. ⊠Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. ⊠The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.â
Ulin is the author of âSidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles.â A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the former book editor and book critic of The Times.
ALSO
Sign up for our Book Club newsletter
Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.