Reading and Wrestling with Philip Roth | The New Yorker

Reading and Wrestling with Philip Roth | The New Yorker

Reading and Wrestling with Philip Roth



By Alexandra Schwartz

5:00 P.M.









Lee Grant, Jack Somack, Renée Lippin, and Richard Benjamin in a scene from Ernest Lehman’s 1972 screen adaptation of Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.”Photograph by ZUMA Press / Alamy



The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of that atom bomb of American-Jewish hetero masculinity, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” includes an afterword in which Philip Roth tells a joke, passed off with a straight face as a factual account, of how his famous novel came to be. He was a twenty-three-year-old student at the University of Chicago, he writes, freshly returned from an uneventful stint in the Army, and had just sat down to dinner at the campus cafeteria when he discovered a sheet of paper lying on his usual table. On it were typed “nineteen sentences that taken together made no sense at all,” which Roth reproduces in a single dense paragraph. They are the openings of each of the novels that he had published up to the present, starting with “Goodbye, Columbus,” in 1959 (“The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses”), and ending with “Operation Shylock,” from 1993 (“For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book”). It was now 1994; at sixty-one, Roth had finally fulfilled his obligation to realize the stories suggested by this mysterious list. “Free at last,” he wrote. “Or that’s what I would probably be tempted to think if I were either starting out all over again or dead.”

In a sense, Roth did start out all over again. The year after the “Portnoy” anniversary edition appeared, he published “Sabbath’s Theater,” the masterpiece that initiated his prolific and profound late phase. Did Roth sense that he still had eleven novels left to write before his life’s work would be complete? Now his list truly is finished. Yes, he announced his retirement in 2012, but it was hard not to wonder whether, having monkishly devoted himself to the writer’s life for so many years, he would be tempted to violate this strange new vow. But he kept his word. In the Jewish tradition, life is figured as an entry on a divine list kept in a book. On Rosh Hashanah, the new year, it is written who shall live and who shall die, and on Yom Kippur, the day of reckoning, it is sealed. “May you be inscribed in the Book of Life,” Jews wish one another in the ten-day interim. When Roth retired, he wrote his own fate. Now it has been sealed by other means—at least where the mortal man is concerned. The writer lives on as long as his readers do.

There is a kernel of truth in Roth’s playful self-creation myth. He may not have received a series of starter sentences on a piece of paper, but his gargantuan productivity is hardly easier to explain by other, more natural means. He wrote like a person commanded to write. He knew what he had been called to do, and he did it. Whether you started reading him in the fifties, the seventies, the nineties, or the two-thousands, the books came steadily, continuously. From “Goodbye, Columbus” on up, he had the writer’s crucial tool: authority. How did he come by it, this middle-class Jewish boy from Weequahic? In a BBC documentary about Roth, made in 1993 (you can watch it on YouTube) Saul Bellow, who had set a model for Roth by leaping giddily across the gulf that separated the words “Jewish” and “American,” says, “For a kid of that background to become an author—that formidable word—requires an act of self-anointment. You’re the only one to pour the oil on you! You pour the oil on your own head.”

That is one of the great observations about what it means to write, and it’s true no matter what you’re writing, no matter who you are, no matter what kind of background you come from. Nobody else is going to pour the oil on you. Nobody else gives you permission to say what you have to say—and, by the time they refuse, it’s likely already too late. In the same documentary, Roth mordantly paraphrases Czeslaw Milosz: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Substitute “the Tribe” for “family,” and you get a sense of how a good slice of the American Jewish community felt about Roth when he got going.

Authority is something you have to claim for yourself, though how to do it can be a tricky business. In David Remnick’s Profile, from 2000, Roth describes—earnestly, this time—what led to his “Portnoy” breakthrough. He had written multiple lengthy drafts centered on the sexual obsessions of a neurotic Jewish boy, but none was right. Then he hit on the idea of his protagonist telling his woes to a shrink. “I needed permission, and permission came with casting the book as a psychoanalytic confession,” Roth said. “The theatre of the analyst’s office says the rule here is that there are no rules, the rule here is no inhibitions, the rule here is no restraint, the rule here is no decorum.” It is encouraging to know that “Portnoy,” a book of explosive, tumescent, outrageous lack of inhibition, did not fly as easily into the world as it might seem.


I first read “Portnoy’s Complaint” as a college freshman in a seminar called “Jewish Masculinity and Ethnicity Since World War II,” or “Nice Jewish Boys,” for short. It was a class on straight Jewish American men who turned their neuroses into art, and I, a young Jewish American woman, had decided in the total,hallucinogenic liberty of the first semester as an undeclared major, to take it. (My father, put in the strange position of seeing himself categorically identified as a subject for his daughter’s sociological analysis, was surprised.)

I don’t know what I had been expecting from “Portnoy,” but it wasn’t what I got. Books that were notorious in 1968 did not often feel so in 2005; time dulls most sharp edges. But my memory of reading “Portnoy” is of feeling, by turns, amused, excited, offended, bored, and sometimes that real rare thing, shocked. “Extreme misogyny? Or is that the wrong word?” I wrote, in the margins, by a passage where Alexander Portnoy compares elderly Jewish ladies to cows. To be an eighteen-year-old girl reading “Portnoy” is a little like being a fifteen-year-old girl reading “Lolita.” You see how you may be seen by men—as a body, whether appealing or repulsive, and either way, sucked dry of soul—and the vision is horrifying. And yet the freedom of the book—its unabashed, unapologetic appetite—was thrilling, too.

The second Roth we read was “The Ghost Writer.” To go from Portnoy, spewing his stream of consciousness all over the page, to the gravitas of Nathan Zuckerman was like being transported to a cloister after a night at the club. “The Ghost Writer” is a bildungsroman—Zuckerman announces so, in the novel’s first sentence—structured around a young writer’s pilgrimage to the home of his literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. But it is easy to forget that the novel is really about three writers, not just that mentor/mentee pair. Lonoff has a young lover: Amy Bellette, a student at the local college, whom Zuckerman, in one of modern literature’s great inventive flights of fancy, imagines to be Anne Frank, who has survived Auschwitz and assumed a new identity. Frank, of course, wrote one of the major books of the twentieth century, and that is how Zuckerman chooses to see her: not as some embalmed symbol of lost Jewish life, but as “a marvelous young writer” with “no poisonous notion of being interesting or serious. She just is.” By contrast, Zuckerman’s nemesis in the novel, a rabbi who believes that Zuckerman’s writing is bad for the Jews, is determined to see Frank as a saint, pure in her martyrdom. I thought of that rabbi last week, when it was reportedthat two hidden pages from Frank’s diaries have been uncovered, revealing thoughts about sex and prostitution—a glint of cosmic justice that would surely have made Roth smile.

But Amy Bellette isn’t Anne Frank. Zuckerman resurrects a dead woman and transposes his invented story onto a living one, obscuring her behind it. It is an unsettling truth of the novel that the invented Anne seems more real to Zuckerman than does the sad, ill-used Amy herself. That is how it can sometimes feel, to read Roth as a woman: you see the women he writes suddenly illuminated, with brilliant sensitivity, and then, once again, obscured behind the Vaseline lens of fantasy or, worse, ridicule. I do not say it is always the case. Often, it is not. I love the ferocious, mortal Drenka, in “Sabbath’s Theater”; I love, differently, Maria, in “The Counterlife,” whose dialogue with Zuckerman’s ghost is crushing in its quiet heartbreak. About Consuela, David Kepesh’s young lover in “The Dying Animal”—indeed, about “The Dying Animal”—I have far more conflicted feelings. It is difficult, just now, to read about a professor who spends his semester targeting his students for sex, only to have his heart unexpectedly snag on one of them, and it has always been especially difficult to see Consuela suffer the ravages of disease as old Kepesh goes on living. (“Asymmetry,” Lisa Halliday’s deft and subversive roman à clef about a young woman’s love affair—love is the right word here—with a Roth doppelgänger, makes a beautiful pairing with, and answer to, that novel in particular.) But “The Dying Animal” touches me as much as it unsettles me. I enjoy my conflict with it. I like to argue with Roth, to wrestle with him. It is one of the pleasures of reading him.


To write fiction is to play God. Novelists bring a world into being and people it with souls whose fates they bend as they will. Roth bent time and reality; he went digging in American history and produced counterhistories as he wrote of lives and counterlives. For years, he had written of death, some of the lines so blunt and beautiful you would want them on your own tombstone. Here is one, from “Exit Ghost”: “The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly.” Roth spent much of his life describing death, arguing with it, joking about it, cursing and blessing it. Whatever poetry he found at the end, he takes with him to the grave.



Alexandra Schwartz is a staff writer at The New Yorker