Philip Roth is my favourite living novelist; I also consider him the best contemporary American novelist. I’ve read: The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, The Human Stain, Operation Shylock, The Plot Against America, Goodbye, Columbus, Letting Go, Portnoy’s Complaint, Sabbath’s Theater, and The Prague Orgy, his only work I haven’t enjoyed to date. I’m currently reading When She Was Good. I like to think I’ve read enough by him to judge his work fairly and appreciate it without the distortions that often cling to the discussions about him.
There are some lazy accusations against Roth that recur like clichés that refuse to die. My favourite accusation, and the easiest to counter, is that Roth always writes the same novel; this Standard Roth Novel always involves a sleazy male protagonist full of sexual hang-ups niggling about his miserable life. And he’s always Jewish.
This latter fact is as abominable as the fact that most Vargas Llosa’s novels have Peruvian male protagonists, or that most Kundera’s novels have Czech male protagonists, or that most Dostoevsky’s novels have male Russian protagonists. Like I wrote, laziness.
But, the critic will say, it’s a fact that Roth only writes about sex. This is another gross misunderstanding of his work, perpetuated by one of his most popular novels, Portnoy’s Complaint. In fact Roth writes predominantly about human relationships, of which sexuality is a part. He writes about fathers and sons, husbands and wives, marriage, divorce, child-rearing, death and mourning, and loneliness. This is, of course, the meat of his novels; other themes include racism, anti-Semitism, Jewish discrimination against Gentiles, McCarthyism, terrorism, celebrity cult, adoption, politics, Vietnam, combat stress reaction, old age, wife beating, alcoholism, Puritanism, music, marionettes, baseball, World War II, the Great Depression, and class conflicts. Roth constantly finds new things to write about and often gives his characters different backgrounds, interests and personalities.
Another criticism against Roth is his misogyny. Again I think Portnoy’s Complaint, for being so iconic, has planted in most people’s minds the notion that Roth’s novels are just long ramblings against women. There are two arguments against this: the first is that Roth has created some extraordinarily vivid female characters, with deep inner lives, such as Brenda Patimkin (Goodbye, Columbus), Lucy Nelson (When She Was Good), Libby Herz and Martha Reganhart (Letting Go), and Faunia Farley (The Human Stain). But, the critics complain, his women are castrating ball-busters, mean-spirited, selfish, hysterical, and manic. This is absolutely true, and it’d be a damning fact against Roth if his male characters weren’t much worse. The poverty of interpretation of the people who criticise Roth never ceases to amaze me. One has to be a very poor reader to take a figure like Alex Portnoy at face value, as a spokesman for the author. When I was reading Portnoy’s Complaint, I quickly realised Alex was meant to be laughed at, not with. Only someone with little experience reading thinks Roth is condoning the disgusting behaviour of Alex, and only someone biased and looking for controversy fails to notice that all the women that Alex treats like objects and sex dolls are better adjusted, more sensitive and normal than him.
Alex is written for laughs. Roth doesn’t write for laughs when he’s writing about alcoholic fathers, wife-beaters and family men who run out on their families. Misandry is acceptable and laudable, but suggesting that women can be horrible human beings too is taboo and must be suppressed with critical backlash.
Another point that detractors often bring up is that Roth is an insignificant, insular writer in world literature. This is mere wishful thinking and flies in the face of evidence to the contrary. Although he doesn’t write about the pain of exile or war-torn countries, worthy themes, his novels about ordinary people with ordinary problems are much admired by world-renowned writers such as Saul Bellow, J.M. Coetzee and Milan Kundera, who recently devoted a chapter to him in Encounters. Roth, on the other hand, was essential in bringing Eastern European writers such as Kundera, Danilo Kis, Tadeusz Borowski, Bruno Schulz and more to the attention of American readers, thanks to his work as editor of Penguin’s Writers From Other Europe series. Obviously Roth is quite conversant with world literature. And he’s widely translated.
What do you think?