One of the last of his generation and significance, but on a different
wavelength
[Edit 5/24/18. Edit 10/1/18.]
If my readers wonder why I didn’t include Philip Roth in my list of “Sons of Joyce” writers in a blog
series including this entry among others,
I have mulled over whether I should have included Roth. In part this is because
he wasn’t of the “manic-minded” strain of thought where the conscience of a
protagonist (or of the narrator himself) is the field through which the writing
ranges, on the assumption that an individual’s conscience and strength were
prime human values, not “being a node in a network with a selfie-cute face,” as
seems the big value today.
But also Roth was different, in ways I could comment on but
as might, to a large extent, reflect my own peculiar literary tastes.
Roth was actually one of the first modern-day writers I read
in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when cutting my teeth on ambitious
literature in part to be a writer of such material someday. I read his Portnoy’s Complaint first (in 1979, I
think), which before reading it I was under the impression was a big
laugh-riot; somehow I thought this meant it was as important to check out as
had been Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 for
me. I can’t fully remember Portnoy
today—I remember it being funny, but not a laugh riot; and its sexual side,
which I think made it super-notorious in its day (~1969), escapes me now to
some extent; I would have to read it again (and maybe would have a far
different appreciation of it).
I also read (in the early 1980s, perhaps) Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (I know I read the
title novella; I don’t remember if I read other stories in the collection). And
I read his 1960s novel When She Was Good
(in about 1985), which despite what the title suggests wasn’t a mere sexual
bacchanal; I remember it as being affecting (from the female main character’s
side), and worth reading, but I am foggy on it (it’s been about 33 years).
Then I didn’t read other Roth novels, though I read reviews
on him (over many years) with interest. I have long been interested to read his
The Counterlife, one of the so-called
Zuckerman novels. It’s interesting that with all the obit encomiums and works-listing
I’ve heard today, I’ve not heard about the Zuckerman novels, which “back in the
day” seemed to be taking over his general set of objectives by the later 1980s.
I think Roth appealed to me less than did Heller, Thomas Pynchon,
John Barth, William Gaddis, and even Norman Mailer [5/24/18: I forgot Saul Bellow, an influence on me], because the other men (in
their younger-man’s works especially, which tend to define a writer) embraced a
wider vision of this country—its range of people, its variety of experiences,
its potential for violence and suffering, its figuring in sometimes-awful world
history. (I have not read enough of John Updike either, but he could be
considered maybe narrow in a WASP’s way as Roth was narrow in a Jewish way.) Not
until Roth did a few novels late in life did he start addressing what other
American novelists had made their main focus, such as in The Plot Against America and I
Married a Communist and others.
I think it can be said he was a novelist who was most
comfortable working within a narrow palette, looking especially at
interpersonal situations and not so much broad and violent history. As I have
worked on the Todd-house series (and thought about other issues), I have
roughly worked up some ways to outline the types of mentalities, or ways of
positioning themselves, of Jews in the U.S. There are (this is a start; subject
to refinement):
* The “new Episcopalian”—someone aiming to be a big pillar
of society (possible example—Janet Yellen);
* The “street punk” or “street screamer” (in this category, especially
of the “screamer” subtype, which can encompass a range of types, I would
include Bernie Sanders, not to say he’s gauche, just politically inconvenient);
* The fastidious analyst/clergyman type.
I would consider Roth in the third category. (How the latter
two categories have some relevance and use for further discussion will come up
when, months from now, I hope to look at a philosophy-scholar debate in 1979 between
Albert William Levi and Steven Schwarzschild, on the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein. Sounds arcane? Wait till you hear about this.)
Roth was a fastidious writer, which was a sort of impression
I think I even got when reading his early novels as I described above. In my
reading in the 1980s and 1990s, the decades in which I read adult-aimed books
the most, I felt he didn’t quite meet my needs as other writers did. As the
years went on and I read reviews of his works, I had interest in some, such as
one or two Zuckerman books, as I’ve suggested.
I think this kind of narrowness in him is why he didn’t win
the Nobel Prize. In fact, this lack of his winning has been mentioned numerous
times, and I would say by now that the “reason this happened” is reflected in
how he never won it. Why must he have? He didn’t meet the judges’ criteria.
(And as it happened, Roth himself didn’t seem to mind he didn’t win it.)
I’ve remarked before, in some blog entry last year or in
2016, that Roth was the type of male novelist, of some range of ostensibly “big
themes,” who would appeal more to women than would the likes of, especially,
Mailer. I am not writing Roth off; I hope to read some more of him in whatever
time I have left to read more lengthy books. But he was a Jewish writer who was
(to symbolize the issues a bit) not the sort who seemed like he either knew how
to use workman’s tools, or knew a lot of people who did; or who had directly
witnessed a lot of horrific history. He had, you could say, more of an inward
bent, and an interest in more domesticated life. This didn’t make him trivial;
but we can understand why his narrow range of themes marked him a certain way when
we compare him with William Faulkner.
Faulkner, some might say, was a Southerner who wrote
often-gothic Deep South stories. What made him more widely relevant? Well, the
violence, and way in which he traced history as woven throughout the more
modern lives he depicted, put him on a par with other major American writers, and
European writers, who did the same. The sense of upheaval in Southern
predicaments was something that resonated strongly with the sense of upheaval
people (across the U.S., who liked to read novels) had in the mid-twentieth
century, when European wars, economic depression, and Third World dislocation
all impressed on educated people as defining modern life. Roth didn’t really
start treating this sort of stuff until late in life, and then, as I gleaned
from reviews, he might have been a seasoned/skilled writer in depicting it, but
there was something on the derivative side about it. He had spent a lot of his most
creative energy already on the early works like Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, and the later Zuckerman
books.
