Philip Roth (1933-). Biography and Creativity

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 19, 1933. The second of Bess and Herman Roth’s two sons, Roth was born into an ethnic interwar neighborhood. His immigrant parents raised Philip and his brother in a predominantly Jewish, lower-middle-class Newark neighborhood called Weequahic. Herman Roth, like the protagonist’s father in Roth’s well-known novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), was a traveling insurance salesman, who attempted to sell umbrella policies to poor families during the darkest days of the depression.

In his nonfiction work Patrimony (1991), Roth relates how stressful this job was for his father and details the effects it had on his own childhood. In particular, the failure of his father’s career to get past the anti-Semitic gatekeepers of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) establishment that ran the insurance company made a deep impression on young Roth. Bess, a homemaker, was her youngest son’s greatest fan and, Roth has insisted, does not resemble any of the Jewish maternal figures he has featured in a number of his works.

The Newark of Roth’s childhood, Weequahic in particular, is immortalized in countless Roth novels. Newark is to Roth’s oeuvre what the fictional Yoknapatawpha County was to that of WILLIAM Faulkner, a combined muse and amanuensis through which the author could weave his startling insights into American culture. In works from his controversial Portnoy’s Complaint to American Pastoral (1997), the first novel in his so-called American trilogy, Roth portrays the Newark of his youth in painstaking detail.

Often seen through a veil of nostalgia, the New Jersey of Roth’s youth is portrayed with nuance and intricacy. At times, he represents Newark as an American utopia, far from the racial and economic ills that would swallow the city during the 1960s and 1970s. At other moments in Roth’s work, such as The Plot against America (2004), Newark becomes the subject of a prolonged meditation on what he views as the decline of the American city during the 20th century.

Like many of the upwardly mobile characters in Roth’s works, especially in Goodbye, Columbus (1959), the members of the community he grew up in were caught between their desire to retain a separate, distinct culture and the socioeconomic pressure to assimilate into the secular world. The conflicts that arise between these tendencies— the preservation of Jewish cultural identity and the seductive pull of a homogenizing America— are central to Roth’s work.

In The Ghost Writer (1979), Roth emphasizes how this widespread Jewish-American dilemma impacts its artists and writers, who often feel an excessive pressure to act as representatives of their people. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s frequent literary alter ego, makes his first appearance in this work. As Roth himself had, Zuckerman has his first taste of commercial and critical success undermined by the rabid criticism he receives from members of the Jewish community when he publishes material that fails to cast the most flattering light on Jews.

A cosmopolitan sophisticate in New York City, Zuckerman receives letters from his parents begging him to refrain from depicting the darker depths of Jewish life. The Human Stain (2000), too, contrasts “the coercive, inclusive, historical, inescapable moral we with its insidious E pluri- bus unum . . . [with] the raw I with all its agility” (108). Additionally, Roth is deeply invested in exploring what it means to be an American in the 20th century. One of his most recent novels, The Plot against America (2004), chronicles the childhood experiences of a fictional “Philip Roth” who is frequently caught between his family’s zeal for America, with its espousal of democracy, and the latent anti-Semitism he encounters. Roth has been exploring such themes since a very young age.

After graduating from high school, the precocious Roth moved to New Brunswick to study at Rutgers, then on to Bucknell University in rural Pennsylvania. Receiving his B.A. there, he then moved to Chicago to pursue graduate studies in English literature. There Roth obtained his first teaching position and befriended his fellow Jewish- American novelist and mentor, Saul Bellow; Roth also met his first wife, a blond midwesterner named Mary Ann Martinson. Roth’s marriage to Martinson—a perfect example of the unattainable ideal he celebrated and stereotyped throughout his career—was fraught with trouble, leading to their separation in 1963.

Martinson later died in a car crash in 1968, the year before Portnoy’s Complaint was published. As he later admitted in his experimental memoir, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), Roth based the self-destructive female protagonist of his third novel, When She Was Good (1967), on his former wife—one of his few novels that do not take place in Newark. Other female characters inspired by Martinson would find subsequent form in many of Roth’s novels, including Maureen Tarnopol in My Life as a Man (1974), the Polish-American oncology nurse wanda Jane “Jinx” Possesski of Operation Shylock (1993), and Faunia Farley in The Human Stain.

Roth joined the U.S. Army in 1955 but received an early discharge because of an injury sustained during training. Roth devoted much of his time while enlisted to writing. Many of the stories in his first published work, Goodbye, Columbus, were written during this period. Composed of a number of short stories and a novella of the same name, Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award in 1960, surprising many literary tastemakers, who argued that the previously unpublished 28-year-old had only won the coveted award because no established contemporary writer had published during 1959. Other critics saw Roth’s rapid rise in literary circles as a sign of things to come. His subsequent success bore out these predictions.

Goodbye, Columbus contains many of the themes that would recur in Roth’s subsequent work, from Jewish-American assimilation to gender politics and sexual license in postwar America. The two works that followed, Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good, were less successful and deviated from their predecessor in substituting a psychological realism and high seriousness for the rollicking Jewish angst of his first work. This new style was heavily indebted to the American author Henry James, whom Roth had studied in college and graduate school and continued to admire throughout his career. After these ill-received works, Roth published the immensely popular and controversial Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. A fictional confession, the novel follows the life of Alexander Portnoy, who pursues sexual freedom and adventure, yet who is incessantly undermined by the ethical hand wringing caused by his Jewish upbringing. Roth’s novel became an instant classic, ushering in a period of great critical success for the young author.

Although Roth received widespread critical accolades and commercial success with this groundbreaking glimpse into the psyche of a Jewish neurotic, his skills continued to develop. During the 1970s and 1980s Roth produced a number of notable works, such as the remarkable The Ghost Writer, which introduced his alter ego, the writer Nathan Zuckerman. In this novel, Roth explores his Jewish identity with newfound satirical zeal. Zuckerman’s mentor, E. I. Lonoff, is a thinly veiled caricature of fellow Jewish-American writer BERNARD Mala- MUD, and Zuckerman’s love interest is the Holocaust victim Anne Frank. In 1986 Roth wrote one of his most experimental works, The Counterlife. In this novel Roth probes the boundaries between fact and fiction in writing and sends Zuckerman to Israel to make sense of long-standing conflicts between Israeli and diasporic Jews.

During this time Roth became increasingly preoccupied with Eastern and Central Europe— then still under the oppressive sway of Soviet-style communism—and the need for American writers to enter into dialogue with their brethren behind the iron curtain. To this end Roth inaugurated the Writers from the Other Europe series in 1974. Published by Penguin Books, this series gave noted writers such as Tadeusz Borowski, Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, and Ivan Klima a chance to reach a wider audience in America. Roth remained editor of this series until 1989.

Roth’s work with the Writers from the Other Europe series is only one example of his engagement with political issues throughout his career. Other examples include his 1970 novel Our Gang, which lampooned Richard Nixon-era politics by imagining the key players in the Watergate scandal as members of a failing baseball team. The Human Stain dealt with a more recent national debacle, President Bill Clinton’s alleged affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinski, and the frenzy to impeach him.

Roth’s efforts in the Other Europe series are also indicative of his long-standing preoccupation with investigating the ever-changing role of writers in the 20th century. Prior to the project Roth had long been known for his collegial relationship with other writers and his interest in discussing craft with his favorite fellow artists. Roth collected the myriad interviews he had conducted with writers over the years into a single volume, entitled Shoptalk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (2001).

After Bellow’s death, excerpts from Roth’s illuminating Shoptalk interviews with the writer were published in the New Yorker as a fitting postscript to the literary giant’s life. The Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld, also profiled in Shoptalk, appears in Roth’s Operation Shylock. Operation Shylock features a fictionalized version of Appelfeld, one of the American Jewish writer’s great friends and the catalyst for his burgeoning interest in the meaning of the Jewish diaspora.

As in Operation Shylock, Roth’s work has often been irreverent. In The Breast (1972), Roth plays upon Franz Kafka’s famous novella The Metamorphosis (1915), by telling the story of David Kepesh, who wakes up one day to find himself transformed not into a bug but into a breast, the erotic object that has dominated his life up until that point. Kepesh appears in other humorous works by Roth, such as The Professor of Desire (1977), and somber ones such as The Dying Animal (2001), a meditation on mortality, sexuality, and the human body. Roth’s interest in playing with form has elicited comparisons of his work with that of the equally prolific American writer John Updike.

Both are preoccupied with national and personal history, as well as the capacity of literary realism to represent the lives of Americans. The flights of fancy that characterize a number of Roth’s work during the 1980s and early 1990s never eclipsed his commitment to literary realism. Even Roth’s most experimental works, such as 1986’s The Counterlife or 1993’s Operation Shylock, feature finely wrought characters facing realistic situations that foreground the perils of their complicated ethnic and national histories.

Critics have often questioned the autobiographical component of Roth’s fiction. Although his disastrous first marriage had led Roth to vow that he would never wed again, he and the British stage and screen actress Claire Bloom were married in 1990 (after many years of dating). After their relationship ended acrimoniously, Bloom published a memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), that detailed her problems with Roth. When Roth wrote I Married a Communist (1998), the second and least well-received volume in his American trilogy, many critics noted the similarity between Bloom and the hysterical actress figure in the novel, viewing her as a thinly veiled representation of his former wife.

Further, Roth’s adoption of hyperarticulate, lascivious Jewish men to narrate his novels has led many to question whether the author is writing memoir or fiction. He has disavowed such an intimate link between his fiction and life during countless interviews and in his 1988 memoir, The Facts. In this work Roth further complicates the nature of his fiction by writing a straight autobiography that is interspersed by comments from his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who challenges the veracity of what is being written. Roth’s narrative strategy undermines the conventions of the memoir, as Roth so often does in other novels such as The Counterlife.

The controversial Sabbath’s Theater (1995) has aroused wildly mixed reactions among critics. Some, such as Harold Bloom, call it Roth’s masterpiece. The novel features Mickey Sabbath, “The Evangelist of Fornification,” a 64-year-old arthritic puppeteer and academic, an aging version of Alex Portnoy. Sabbath obsesses about sex and death, mourns the loss of his mistress, and feels an “uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life,” which has taken a downward turn since a phone-sex tape scandal during which he was forced to resign from a teaching position. Yet Sabbath, with his “laughable hunger for more,” cries out for more life: “More defeat! More disappointment! More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis. . . . More disastrous entanglement in everything.” Throughout the work Roth weaves literary allusions to a range of works by literary greats as Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, William Shakespeare, and William Butler Yeats, creating a tour de force for which Roth received his second National Book Award (the first was for Goodbye, Columbus).

Roth has twice been honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Roth also received the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral and the National Medal of Arts at the White House the following year. In 2001 he received the Gold Medal in fiction, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ highest award, for his entire body of work. Despite his varied, numerous achievements, Roth’s unwavering narrative voice has remained consistent throughout his illustrious career: It jumps off the page or, as young Nathan Zuckerman puts it, “comes from just behind the knees.” Comical, poignant, muscular, biting, and brilliant, Roth’s work provides his readers with an unparalleled portrait of postwar America.