Obituary - Philip Roth, novelist

Died: May 22, 2018

WHEN in 2012 Philip Roth, who has died aged 85 of heart failure, announced that he was retiring as a novelist, it was reported as if a venerable high street chain had gone into liquidation leaving countless of its erstwhile customers wondering where they might now shop for life’s essentials. For nigh on 60 years Roth had written novels and stories that had become ingrained in the American psyche and were a gauge of how its ‘Dream’ was progressing – or, more usually, regressing. Roth, like other writers of his generation, including Saul Bellow, John Updike and Norman Mailer, was a totemic figure whose every pronouncement was news. Thus when he said, “there’s more to life than writing and publishing fiction”, it was a bitter pill for his followers to swallow.

For Roth, life and fiction were so entwined that separating them was a task few felt qualified to confront. His work regularly featured characters named after him and whose lives and travails seemed to parallel his. Nathan Zuckerman, who featured in nine of his novels, beginning in 1974 with My Life as a Man and culminating, in 2007, with Exit Ghost, is his creator in all but name. Not, of course, that Roth saw it that way. For him, Zuckerman was “an act”. Referring to The Anatomy Lesson (1981), he added: “I am a writer writing a book impersonating a writer who wants to be a doctor impersonating a pornographer – who then, to compound the impersonation, to barb the edge, pretends he’s a well-known critic. Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.”

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, the second son of Herman Roth and Bess Finkel, themselves the offspring of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland. Throughout his son’s upbringing and beyond, Herman worked for an insurance company which allowed his family to claim lower-middle-class status. Roth attended local schools and immersed himself in the life of Newark’s Weequahic district to which he returned repeatedly throughout his career, mythologising it as William Faulkner did Lafayette County, Mississippi. But whereas Faulkner renamed his stomping ground Yoknapatawapha County, Roth employed no such subterfuge. Thus real and imaginary life ran side by side, the one as tangible and rich as the other.

Weequahic was dominated by Jews and Roth’s relationship with the religion of his forefathers and parents was another potent – and constant – aspect of his fiction. In 1952, he opted to study English literature at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. There, he was founding editor of a literary magazine, Et Cetera, and began to write short stories. Throughout the 1950s his stories appeared in a variety of publications. One, The Contest for Aaron Gold, was deemed of such quality that it was selected for the 1956 edition of Best American Stories. Three years later came his first book, Goodbye, Columbus. Among its contents was the eponymous novella and a story titled Defender of the Faith which, on its first publication in the New Yorker, enraged Jewish organisations and rabbis who denounced the magazine and condemned Roth as anti-semitic. It was a taste of things to come.

In the 1960s Roth’s reputation gathered momentum. Letting Go (1962) – “a brilliant, masterly evocation of America in the fifties” – was his second novel. It was followed five years later by When She Was Good. But his breakthrough book, the one that would define him for a generation, was Portnoy’s Complaint. Published in 1969, it became a number-one fiction bestseller and a widely discussed cultural phenomenon, not least because of its principal character’s obsession with onanism. Roth himself, however, took no part in the public debate and withdrew to a writers’ retreat while the storm the raged. Later, interviewing himself as was his wont, he defended Portnoy against accusations of obscenity. “Do you think there will be Jews who will be offended by this book?” he asked. To which he replied: “I think there will even be Gentiles who will be offended by this book.”

As may be deduced from this, Roth rather revelled in controversy. Feminists were another group who took umbrage at him, incensed, for example, by what they regarded as his unsympathetic portrayal of females in his novels and the unbridled libidos of aged male characters who looked lustily at women young enough to be their grand-daughters. How much Roth intended to shock is unclear. Asked, for example, if he had a “Roth reader” in mind when he wrote, he replied: “No, I occasionally have an anti-Roth reader in mind. I think, ‘How he is going to hate this!’ That can be just the encouragement I need.” What is clear is that, in an increasingly unshockable age, his capacity to induce outbreaks of righteous indignation was undiminished. As one perplexed female critic noted of The Humbling, published in 2009 when he was 72, “I think we can ... agree without risking too much contradiction that the green strap-on dildo was not Roth's finest hour.”

By then, however, his oeuvre had already been recognised if not by the Nobel Literature committee then by the Library of America, an independent non-profit organisation which vows to keep in print in perpetuity the nation’s “best and most significant writing”. The Roth edition, the third of its kind to feature a living writer – the others being Saul Bellow and Eudora Welty – runs to nine volumes, several of which comprise one thousand pages.

In the 1990s, by which time some critics felt his best days were over, Roth embarked on what has since become known as The American Trilogy. It opened with American Pastoral (1997) in which Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov, a legendary high school athlete and the inheritor of his father’s Newark glove factory, comes of age in the boom time of postwar Second World War America. It was succeeded a mere year later by I Married a Communist, set in the 1940s, when anti-Communist witch-hunting became a national pastime and international affront. The trilogy concluded with The Human Stain (2009) in which Coleman Silk, a septuagenarian college professor, is forced to retire when politically correct colleagues declare him a racist. Set in 1998, against the backdrop of the impeachment of a president, it is replete with irony, shining a sardonic light on a nation still deeply fictionalised and riven with religious and ideological polarities.

Taken as whole, The American Trilogy perhaps represents the pinnacle of Roth’s achievement. A work of great maturity and deep insight, it is also marked by writing of such luminous elegance as Roth, never the greatest of stylists, had rarely achieved previously. Thereafter he continued to publish novels but they were of a smaller scale and some are more likely to survive than others. Few writers, however, have been the recipient of more awards. He won a Pulitzer, National Book Awards, the WH Smith Prize twice, the PEN/Nabokov Award, the Man Booker International Prize, the National Humanities Medal at the White House and countless others.

Meanwhile, his childhood home in Newark is marked with a plaque as a historic landmark and the nearby intersection is named Philip Roth Plaza.

In person, Roth could be peppery and he had a reputation for making underprepared interviewers feel like they were specks of dandruff on his collar. Tall and spare and bespectacled, he dressed conservatively in sombre hues, like a lawyer or an academic. “He listens carefully to everything,” remarked one journalist, “makes lots of quick jokes, and likes to be amused.”

His personal life was complicated. He married twice, first in 1959 to Margaret Williams, from whom he separated three years later. She died in a car crash in 1968. In 1990, he married his longtime partner, the actress Claire Bloom. They were divorced in 1994, after which Bloom wrote Leaving a Doll’s House, a blistering memoir which laid bare their fraught relationship. Never one to let sleeping dogs lie, Roth responded by portraying Bloom unflatteringly as a character called “Eve Frame” in I Married a Communist. Not without reason, he described it as a “revenge novel”.

For Roth, writing fiction was “not the road to power”. He did not believe that his novels could change much, nor did this distress him. So what effect did he want to have? “What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book,” he said, “if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don’t. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that’s otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn’t fiction.”

ALAN TAYLOR