Philip Roth, 1933-2018

Philip Roth, 1933-2018. Pictured in 2012, he's reading Ike's Bluff, by Evan Thomas.

Philip Roth died on Tuesday at the age of 85. It’s been a bad ten days for my favorite writers. Like Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth was someone I had read about for many years before I actually started reading his work. I read the novella “Goodbye, Columbus” in 1999, just after graduating from high school. It was in the textbook for a class called “Short Novels,” although we didn’t actually read “Goodbye, Columbus” in the class. I liked “Goodbye, Columbus” when I first read it, but for whatever reason I didn’t read any more of Roth’s work until I read his 2010 novel Nemesis, which would prove to be his last book. (I reviewed Nemesis here.) The book struck a nerve with me, and I found it fascinating. I then went on something of a Roth binge, as I re-read Goodbye, Columbus, which I reviewed here, and then read several of his other books, like The Great American Novel, American Pastoral, Portnoy’s Complaint, Zuckerman Unbound, and his 1988 memoir, The Facts. In a long piece that I’m especially proud of, I wrote about the various connections between Portnoy’s Complaint, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Facts. 

Roth wrote about himself, of course, but he was also astute and perceptive about the United States. His novels tell us much about American life during the late 20^th century. Roth was funny, biting, moving, and always interesting. His career had a fascinating trajectory. He was anointed as an important writer from the very beginning. Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus, won the National Book Award in 1960. He was quickly known as a “writer to watch.” However, his follow up novels, Letting Go and When She Was Good, did not light up the best-seller lists. 

Things changed for Roth in 1969 when the uproariously ribald Portnoy’s Complaint was published. It was a huge hit, and also condemned by many as utter filth. Roth didn’t produce another hit like Portnoy during the 1970’s, and even into the 1980’s it seemed that he might be remembered as someone who peaked early and produced decent, in unspectacular, work regularly after that. And then, something funny happened. In the 1990’s, as he moved into his 60’s, he started turning out one acclaimed book after another. In 1995 he won another National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater. In 1998 he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for American Pastoral. Suddenly, Roth was being acclaimed as the Great American Novelist of his time. There have been few other American writers, if any, who could match Roth’s late blooming productivity and critical acclaim. In the 20 year period from 1990 to 2010, Roth published 15 books. That’s a huge number for a serious literary author. 

One interesting difference between Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe is how Roth was embraced by the literary establishment in a way that Wolfe never was. Wolfe never won the Pulitzer Prize, or any other of the major awards that Roth seemed to collect as easily as baseball cards. I would assume that some of that is due to the fact that Wolfe started his career as a journalist, and only moved to writing fiction when he was in his 50’s. I think some people always thought of Wolfe as a journalist, a category that they consider below fiction. And it may not have helped Wolfe’s case that he basically told fiction writers that they were missing the boat during the 1960’s and 1970’s—that most of the really great writing done about America during that era was done by authors who could be grouped together under the banner of New Journalism. 

What Roth and Wolfe had in common was their iconoclasm. They were never afraid to shake things up, and question the status quo. Both suffered the slings and arrows of outraged critics. Roth had to fend off attacks from Jewish critics that he was a self-hating Jew. He has long been criticized by feminist authors and critics as being a misogynist. Wolfe had to fend off attacks from writers like Norman Mailer and John Updike, who both essentially said that his 1998 novel A Man in Full wasn’t literature. 

I found the 2013 American Masters documentary Philip Roth: Unmasked, to be a fascinating look at the author. In it, Roth comes across as quite funny and down to earth. Thanks to the documentary, I also learned that Philip Roth was left-handed, which was another reason for me to like him.