Philip Roth is America’s greatest living novelist. His books are the most
widely anticipated literary events on both sides of the Atlantic – no other
writer working today mixes universal critical acclaim with such broad
popularity. His latest book, Exit Ghost (his 28th), is due out next month,
and is certain to be the most important of the season.
Roth was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, the oldest child of Herman and
Bessie Roth, first-generation Jewish-Americans. He graduated from high
school at the age of 16 and went on to study with Saul Bellow at the
University of Chicago. His debut novel, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), earned him
the National Book Award – the first of many big prizes – but it wasn’t until
the raunchy, hilarious Portnoy’s Complaint, in 1969, that he became a
bestseller. Although always popular, Roth’s work underwent a resurgence
during the 1990s, when, over an astonishing five-year period, he won all
four of America's leading literary prizes – for four different books.
One of the keys to his success is his ability to discuss the weightiest of
topics – faith, marriage, family – while at the same time being the sexiest
writer in the business. Ever since Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s work has been
characterised by a feverish interest in sex that occasionally teeters on the
edge of the pornographic. Yet his work also remains a highly serious
discussion of man’s tenuous place in an increasingly hostile world. Like so
many prophets before him, Roth sees man as a fallen creature. It’s just that
he usually sees man as falling into bed.
The other hallmark of Roth’s work has been its playfully autobiographical
nature. He has famously said that his writing has always been about “making
fake biography”. Roth-watchers are constantly looking for evidence of the
author’s personal life in his writing – whether it be his feelings toward
his mother, his two spectacularly failed marriages or his uneasy
relationship with fame. To deflect some of this attention, the reclusive
author has created the surrogate character Nathan Zuckerman, a randy
Jewish-American author who shot to fame with the publication of a scandalous
novel. Zuckerman is one of literature’s great creations, a wise-cracking,
bed-hopping trickster who allows his author to keep one step ahead of his
readership. Exit Ghost is rumoured to be his last gasp. Maybe, maybe not.
Let’s just hope it isn’t Roth’s.
PHILIP ROTH IS MALE
Roth’s fiction provides an unabashedly phallocentric view of the world –
hardly surprising for an author who once wrote a novel called My Life as a
Man (1974). Male sexuality is his great, overriding theme. And he has made a
good living at it, too – his first sexually explicit novel, Portnoy’s
Complaint, sold 400,000 hardback copies and made him a literary star. Since
then, his fiction has been rife with bawdy, unabashed descriptions of the
sexual act. Roth’s men are always on the prowl, even if, like Coleman Silk
in The Human Stain (2000), they need Viagra to put a spring in their step.
From Alex Portnoy’s confession that adolescence meant “half my waking life
spent locked behind the bathroom door” to the minute descriptions that
70-year-old David Kepesh provides of his young lover’s genitalia in The
Dying Animal (2001), Roth has written about sex with a candour that has no
equal among serious novelists. This has, of course, drawn the outrage of the
prudish, and made Roth as big a target, for feminists, as Norman Mailer. And
it is true that his female characters can often appear rather less than
human. His response has always been that he simply “writes about the lives
of men”.
PHILIP ROTH IS JEWISH
Although he bristles at being a called a Jewish writer, that is exactly what
Roth is. His work has constantly addressed what it means to be a Jew in the
modern world. The early books were, in many ways, “complaints” against the
stultifying effect of Jewish culture and tradition on his burgeoning
artistic imagination, and drew a chorus of criticisms from fellow Jews that
Roth was self-hating and even antisemitic. (Irving Howe, the eminent
Jewish-American critic, famously claimed that “the cruellest thing anyone
can do with Portnoy’s Complaint is read it twice”.) Roth’s later work has
proven less mutinous toward his heritage, particularly the loving, nuanced
portrait of a Jewish community besieged by a pro-Nazi US government in The
Plot Against America (2004).
Charges of antisemitism become all the more absurd when one notes Roth’s
record as a champion of European Jewish writers such as Primo Levi, whose
voices were muffled by communism and the Holocaust. In the end, Roth, like
his favourite character, Nathan Zuckerman, appears to be “a Jew without
Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple
or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object
itself, like a glass or an apple”. But a Jew nonetheless.
PHILIP ROTH IS AMERICAN
Roth may look at his native country through the prism of Jewish assimilation,
but that does not prevent him from being one of America’s most acute
observers, particularly in the series of big novels he has written in the
past decade.
American Pastoral (1997), which details a father’s search for his radical
daughter in post1960s America, is a brilliant dissection of the limits of
prosperity and idealism, while I Married a Communist (1998) presents a
memorable portrait of the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s. The Human Stain
expands Roth’s vision of race and assimilation in an unexpected direction by
telling the story of a light-skinned African-American writer who was able to
“pass” as white. Roth also took on Nixon, in Our Gang (1971), and tackled
baseball, with The Great American Novel (1973). With the possible exception
of Saul Bellow, briefly his mentor, no other novelist provides a more
comprehensive portrait of what it means to be an American intellectual in
the latter half of the 20th century.
PHILIP ROTH IS NATHAN ZUCKERMAN
The fame and controversy that arrived after the publication of Portnoy’s
Complaint was so intense that Roth felt compelled to create a fictional
surrogate to take the heat – Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish writer who himself
became notorious after writing a book called Carnovsky (whose plot sounds
suspiciously like that of Portnoy’s Complaint). Zuckerman, who has so far
featured in 10 of Roth’s books, can perhaps best be seen as a sort of
pressure-release valve for his creator – the critic Michael Wood refers to
Zuckerman as Roth’s “alter id”. He is a surrogate who allows Roth to write
about his own emotional and intellectual life without indulging in pure
autobiography. Zuckerman even gave Roth the opportunity for payback against
Howe, who was reconfigured as the pompous Milton Appel in Zuckerman Bound
(1985). Early on, Zuckerman was a highly active character, a writer whose
sexual and professional lives were so comprehensively rendered that it was
hard to think of him as being merely the product of an author’s imagination.
Then, in The Counterlife (1987), Zuckerman died of a heart attack – or maybe
he didn’t. Sure enough, he subsequently reemerged, though he is no longer a
randy, globetrotting, self-centred seducer and literary operative, but
rather a wise and dispassionate observer who narrates American Pastoral and
The Human Stain.
PHILIP ROTH IS KIDDING
Roth once famously claimed that “making fake biography, false history,
concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is
my life”. Elsewhere, he describes his literary mission as making “serious
mischief”.
Roth loves to wrong-foot readers, to pull their legs. In Operation Shylock
(1993), he describes with a perfectly straight face how he served as an
Israeli spy in Greece, only to conclude the book by telling the reader that
“this confession is false” – a claim he then laces with ambiguity by
elsewhere suggesting that Mossad made him put it in the book. In The
Counterlife, both of Roth’s main characters die, only to come back to life.
His “novelist’s autobiography”, The Facts (1988), concludes with a long
rebuttal by Zuckerman, who accuses Roth of being “the least completely
rendered of all your protagonists”. Roth’s sense of mischief seemed to catch
up with him in 1989, when a man claiming to be Roth appeared in Israel to
advocate the dissolution of the Jewish state. In response, the old
trickster, writing in the New York Times in 1993, seemed contrite – “Those
whom I’ve offended should be happy to hear that I now have more than a faint
idea of why they have wanted to kill me and of what, rightly and wrongly,
they have been through”.
PHILIP ROTH IS DIVORCED
Roth has been twice divorced, and it’s difficult to judge which break-up was
nastier – or more influential. He separated from his first wife, Margaret
Martinson, in 1963. Their train-wreck marriage provided material for several
novels. Martinson inspired “The Monkey” (Mary Jane Reed) in Portnoy’s
Complaint and Maureen Tarnopol in My Life as a Man, the latter a monstrous
man-wrecker who tricks her writer husband into marriage (something Roth
swears Margaret did to him by buying urine from a homeless woman before her
pregnancy test). In 1990, he married the British actress Claire Bloom, his
longtime companion, though the couple divorced five years later, in a split
so acrimonious that Bloom felt compelled to write a scathing account of the
marriage, Leaving a Doll’s House (1996). In it, she describes Roth as a
controlling, misogynistic monster who forced Bloom’s 18-year-old daughter
out of the house because her conversation bored him. In response, Roth
created the spoilt actress Eve Frame in I Married a Communist, a social
climber who ruins her husband’s life by writing a tell-all autobiography.
PHILIP ROTH IS HIS MOTHER’S SON
Family relations have always stood at the heart of Roth’s work. Portnoy
describes his overbearing mother, Sophie, as “The Most Unforgettable
Character I’ve Met”, and it’s safe to say that Roth feels the same about his
own mother, Bessie, though she is more saint to him than monster: “My mother
was one of those devoted daughters of Jewish immigrants who raised
housekeeping in America to a great art. (Don’t talk to anyone in my family
about cleaning – we saw cleaning in its heyday.)” His father, Herman, an
insurance salesman, looms equally large in the author’s imagination,
inspiring Patrimony (1991), a deeply moving account of the elder Roth’s last
days.
PHILIP ROTH IS PROLIFIC
He has published 28 books since his 1959 debut, Goodbye, Columbus, and there
appears to be no stopping the man as he nears his 75th birthday. What is
most remarkable about Roth’s abundant creativity is that it has only
appeared to increase as he gets older.
PHILIP ROTH IS MORTAL
As Roth ages, so do his protagonists. Death has replaced sex – well, almost –
as their central obsession. In The Dying Animal, David Kepesh claims that,
with old age, “you real-ise that all those bodily parts invisible up to now
(kidneys, lungs, veins, arteries, brain, intestines, prostate, heart) are
about to start making themselves distressingly apparent, while the organ
most conspicuous throughout your life is doomed to dwindle into
insignificance”. Last year’s Every-man, meanwhile, is a veritable shopping
list of the indignities of old age – its narrator jokes that if he were to
write an autobiography, he would call it The Life and Death of a Male Body.
And Roth’s upcoming novel bears an ominous, but characteristically playful
title, borrowed from Shakespeare – Exit Ghost.
PHILIP ROTH IS IMMORTAL
Twenty years ago, Roth might have cracked the top 10 of America’s best living
writers, but the astonishing burst of authorship of the 1990s has propelled
him right to the top of the heap.
Exit Ghost by Philip Roth is published by Jonathan Cape on October 4
Philip Roth in his own words
On the reception of Portnoy’s Complaint So many claimed to be offended by the
masturbation. But that’s silly. Everybody knew about masturbation. What they
were really offended by was the depiction of this level of brutality in a
Jewish family.
On being Jewish-American I know exactly what it means to be Jewish, and it’s
really not interesting. I’m an American... America is first and foremost ...
it’s my language. Identity labels have nothing to do with how anyone
actually experiences life... I don’t accept that I write Jewish-American
fiction. I don’t buy that nonsense about black literature or feminist
literature. Those are labels made up to strengthen some political agenda.
On how he compares Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the
world, reveal the world as it is now. I dig a hole and shine my flashlight
into the hole.
On his literary alter egos Am I Roth or Zuckerman? It’s all me ... Nothing is
me.
On his range Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.
On work The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
On ageing Passion doesn’t change, but you change – you become older. The
thirst for women becomes more poignant. And there is a power in the pathos
of sex it didn’t have before.
On fearing death Oblivion. Of not being alive, quite simply, of not feeling
life, not smelling it. But the difference between today and when I was 12 is
a kind of resignation. It no longer feels like a great injustice that I have
to die.
