Philip Roth, Yesterday’s Young American By Kyle Smith
His later novels may be his most enduring, but future readers may shun even those, because of what they understand about who he was.
The reputations of novels and novelists wax and wane over time. Herman Melville died impecunious, and Moby-Dick didn’t begin to rise to the head of the canon until 30 years after he died. The Great Gatsby was not a great success until after F. Scott Fitzgerald died. Zora Neale Hurston died in obscurity in 1960, was rediscovered in the 1980s, and is now so revered that this spring’s publication of an 87-year-old Hurston manuscript was a literary event, and the book Barracoon today sits at number 2 on the New York Times bestseller list.
On the other hand, Norman Mailer was once the most famous novelist in America. As recently as 1991, publication of one of his books (Harlot’s Ghost) was major cultural news. His books sold hugely. His mantel groaned with the tonnage of his awards. He was a fixture on talk shows. No one who cared about books could fail to have an informed opinion about him, but even people who didn’t read books knew who he was. Today, if you stopped by the English department of an elite university and talked to the undergraduates, you’d have a hard time finding anyone who cares about Norman Mailer, just a decade after his death. Certainly you’d find students who have never heard of him. Norman Mailer is no longer important.
A similar fate may await Philip Roth. Before his death on Tuesday he was widely seen as America’s greatest living novelist. But will he be widely read in 30 years’ time, or even 20? I doubt it, although he may be saved by works that are among his least characteristic efforts.
Departed artists get subjected to a harsh, often unfair reductionism, and in Roth’s case a prodigious output — more than 30 books — will be collapsed into an unflattering assessment passed on from professors to curious undergraduates to less curious undergraduates. Roth, like many of his protagonists, will be described as a striver from the urban immigrant ghettos of the 1940s with a Holocaust-informed persecution complex and a ferocious, rageful lust. Roth, like Mailer, grew up in a culture that struck him as a prison of sexual convention and repression. Much of his writerly energy went into a frenzied, wailing hammering against those walls.
Is this misogyny? It’s certainly unsettling. Imagine teaching The Dying Animal (2001) to college students. Skip the trigger warning; you’d better obtain signed agreements waiving the right to sue you. Roth played with his identity more than any other novelist — refracted it, played with it, calling his Roth-like protagonists Nathan Zuckerman or David Kepesh or (in 1990’s Deception) Philip Roth — but the goatish hostility was a consistent presence. Kepesh, The Dying Animal’s narrator, is a renowned 62-year-old professor who leverages his fame to lure a 24-year-old Cuban student, or rather her large breasts, which are the only part of her that he registers, into his clutches. “She thinks, I am telling him who I am. He’s interested in who I am. That is true, but I am curious about who she is because I want to f**k her. I don’t need all of this great interest in Kafka and Velázquez. . . . I’m wondering, what does any of this have to do with her t*** and her skin and how she carries herself?” At the end, she is dying, not he. Breast cancer.
In Sabbath’s Theater a puppeteer working on the street outside Columbia University would unbutton the shirts of female onlookers: “When Sabbath gauged from her answers that his consort was more playful than most or more uncommonly spellbound, the interrogation would abruptly turn wanton. . . . Only twice did the fingers undo a brassiere catch and only once did they endeavor to caress the nipples exposed.” NPR called the book a “Gruesome . . . vile, brilliant masterpiece.” Sounds about right.
Most of what Roth wrote from came from what today seems a vanishing land, mysterious and increasingly inaccessible. The shame that underlies Roth’s masturbation novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) feels antiquated now that self-gratification is openly joked about. The mistrust between assimilated and non-assimilated Jews in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) is difficult to parse. The shadow of the Holocaust that trails the Anne Frank–obsessed Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer (1979) will be sensed by few younger readers today.
We wish our writers to be heroes, not creatures; we want them to stand for something we can identify with or admire.
Late in life, though, Roth essentially rebooted himself, putting aside some long-standing obsessions. American Pastoral, The Plot against America, and The Human Stain ventured into excitingly fresh territory: radical politics and its legacy in the 1960s, political fantasy rooted in a counterfactual history of American fascism in the 1940s and in campus racial misunderstanding in the 1990s. If any of his books survive into the next generation it will be these three, all of them written past his 60th birthday.
The work and the persona tend to get first intertwined and then conflated, though, and it may be that future readers will shun these books because of what they understand about who Roth was. “There is no narcissism in Roth; the creature in the mirror is given merciless and unblinking scrutiny,” writes Martin Amis in a 2013 piece collected in his new book The Rub of Time. But we wish our writers to be heroes, not creatures; we want them to stand for something we can identify with or admire, the way Hurston does, or the way Fitzgerald does. David Foster Wallace, his life italicized by his suicide, stands for childlike keenness, a hypersensitivity extending all the way down to the plight of the lobster, informed by a torrential rush of information. Challenging and sometimes maddening as his work could be, he continues to grow in stature because of who he was. Wallace is today’s young American. Roth is yesterday’s.
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