About 25 years ago, in my late teens, I encountered Philip Roth’s writing for the first time, in a college classroom. A few of our English professors had put together a short story course for students interested in spending Saturday afternoons reading and dissecting the writings of Chekhov, Singer, Cheever … and Roth. We read and analysed The Conversion of the Jews ,about a young Jewish sceptic repeatedly confronting the Rabbi in his religious education classes about his view that Jesus Christ was less than divine. The rebel is hauled up and humiliated by the Rabbi, then slapped by his mother, before he threatens to jump off the roof if both Rabbi and mother don’t accept the divinity of Christ.
From Roth’s first collection, Goodbye Columbus, published in 1959, when he was all of 26, the darkly ironic story with its scathing takedown of Jewish life in America came to define Roth and his oeuvre. Born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, Roth gave us more than a glimpse into his suburban upbringing with its omnipresent Jewishness featuring widely in many works and upsetting many. Another recurring theme of Roth’s was sexuality and many of his writings mined this aspect of American life, beginning with the 1969 bestseller Portnoy’s Complaint. Criticised both for its explicit sexual content as well as its irreverent treatment of the protagonist’s Jewish identity, the book was banned in Australia for a while. Since then, it has become something of a cultural landmark and remains the novel that Roth is most identified with.
Shades of Kafka
In 1972, Roth published The Breast, a novella with shades of Kafka, in which the protagonist, David Kepesh, an academic, becomes a 155-pound breast. Kepesh featured in two more novels, The Professor of Desire and The Dying Animal. Another character who featured repeatedly in Roth’s works (as many as nine of them) was Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman, who was portrayed as a novelist, was often seen as a stand-in for Roth himself. Four Zuckerman novels — The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and The Prague Orgy (1985) were collected as Zuckerman Bound . In 2007, Roth killed Zuckerman off in Exit Ghost , a novel that revisited in a somewhat different fashion the themes of The Ghost Writer , the first of the Zuckerman novels.
Among the more interesting of the Zuckerman novels was 1998’s I Married a Communist. One character in this novel was seen by many reviewers as being based on the British actress, Claire Bloom, with whom Roth had a relationship for many years and was also married to from 1990 to 1995. The marriage ended in an acrimonious split, and Bloom later portrayed Roth as a vain and selfish man unable to live in the same house with her daughter from an earlier marriage.
Of infidelity
Among Roth’s more interesting fictional experiments was to feature a character named after himself in some books. The 1993 novel Operation Shylock was among the more interesting of the books that employed this technique. This book along with a few others, most notably his 1988 memoir, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, addressed another persistent Roth theme — the relationship of the writer with his characters and the blurring of the line between fact and fiction. One work in this vein was Deception , a novel published in 1990 that featured characters named Philip and Claire and was a story of infidelity.
Far more prolific than his contemporaries John Updike and Saul Bellow, whom he was often bracketed with, Roth was the recipient of virtually every important literary prize barring the Nobel, for which it was rumoured that he had been nominated several times. In 2005, the Library of America decided to collect all of Roth’s work in a series of volumes, an honour rarely accorded to living writers (only Eudora Welty and Bellow had been accorded this before Roth). Clearly, he had come a long, long way from Portnoy.
The Bengaluru-based writer works in publishing.
