Misreading Roth

Is The Controversy that Follows Philip Roth Justified?




Why does controversy seem to follow Philip Roth around? His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, touched off a riot of a reaction in the Jewish- American community when it was published in 1959. Roth, his detractors said, went out of his way to depict his fictional suburban Jews in an unpleasant light, a portrayal that would only give succour to antisemites. Ten years later, in 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint somehow scandalised an America that had witnessed a shocking number of political assassinations, watched nightly the televised carnage of Vietnam, and feared the revolutionaries that seemed to be taking over its cities. (To be fair, most Americans had never before read a depiction of an adolescent masturbating with a piece of liver.) None of the scandals that followed ever reached the heights of these first two, but Roth has, despite writing within a culture that seems to have less and less time for the printed word, shown a consistent talent for making headlines.
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Philip Roth: The Great Escapist

David Gooblar celebrates Philip Roth at seventy-five

For a writer who has claimed that ‘the art of impersonation’ is ‘the fundamental novelistic gift’, impersonating his own interviewer came naturally enough to Philip Roth. In 1973, at the age of forty, having published seven books, he took a moment to sit back, reflect and interview himself on the shape of his career to date. Asking himself about his alternation between the ‘serious’ and the ‘reckless’, Roth gave a long response that eventually cites Philip Rahv’s 1939 essay ‘Paleface and Redskin’, which posited two polarised types of American writer. Paleface writers, like T.S. Eliot and Henry James, were refined, educated, East Coast figures, exhibiting an old-world interest in moral concerns. Redskins, like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, were the writers of the frontier and the big city: emotional, vernacular and energetic, whose work reflected the new world’s vitality and the explorer’s spirit of curiosity. After introducing Rahv’s dichotomy, Roth claims membership in a new, hybrid category of American writer — the ‘redface’, who remains ‘fundamentally ill at ease in, and at odds with, both worlds’. It is telling that Roth does not go on to claim that he writes like some combination of paleface and redskin — there is no assertion here of the ways in which he has been influenced by, say, both James and Twain — but rather it is the alternation between opposing modes, the awkward uncertainty as to which path to choose, that is emphasised:

To my mind, being a redface accounts as much as anything for the self-conscious and deliberate zigzag that my own career has taken, each book veering sharply away from the one before, as though the author was mortified at having written it as he did and preferred to put as much light as possible between that kind of book and himself.

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