“The Counterlife” (1986), for which he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a tour de force of multiple narratives. “The Ghost Writer” (1979) captures the struggle between art and life. His bawdy version of Judaism was now theirs, too. The farce “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1959), for which he won the National Book Award at the age of 26, is a comic romp about fetishism and onanism that caused Gershom Scholem to pronounce this “is just the book for which all anti-Semites have been praying,” a sentiment the president of the Rabbinical Council of America echoed, when he asked, “What is being done to silence this man?”įifty years after the scandal that was Portnoy, the Jewish Theological Seminary awarded Roth an honorary doctorate. ![]() Through comedy, satire, historical narratives, metafiction, novellas and memoir, the reconciliation of sexual decorum and sexual appetite was one of Roth’s mammoth subjects, situated in the merciless grip of anti-Semitism, McCarthyism, Vietnam, race and the culture wars. In the latter, he found something closer to his own American experience - a literature not of the scarred victim but erotic impulse and freedom. In the former, he saw a Yiddish world from the pogrom-ridden shtetls of Europe translated into the proprieties of urban immigrant America. In Blake Bailey’s hands, Roth is the Nice Jewish Boy - from a working-class household in the Weequahic section of Newark in the 1940s, where middle-class Jews were saved, by the luck of their geography, from Nazi genocide - pitted against his lascivious life, literary scandals, psychoanalysis, chronic pain and novels about the American dream, sex, death and, always, Jews.Īs a student at Bucknell and the University of Chicago, Roth fell under the influence of Malamud and Bellow. If Roth’s 1974 characterization seems like having it both ways, it’s also the ideal paradox for a biographer. Put another way, every Roth book, 31 between 19, says something about the kind of person, and novelist, he was, and the kind of bondage he fashioned. ![]() ![]() Of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and himself, Roth added this qualifier: “it is no wonder that the … (fiction of these writers), whatever may be their differences in literary merit and approach, are largely nightmares of bondage, each informed in its way by a mood of baffled, claustrophobic struggle.” Perhaps Oz hadn’t read Roth’s 1974 essay, “Imagining Jews,” where he puts the subject of Jewish fiction plainly: The Jewish writer’s “enterprise … (is) imagining Jews being imagined, by themselves and by others.” Thus, Oz stomps on Portnoy, Zuckerman, Levov, Sabbath and a fistful of Roth’s fictional protagonists. Oz recounts how his grandparents, before emigrating from Odessa, Ukraine, to British-mandated Palestine, had intended to come to America, “in which case I might have been born … in Newark, New Jersey, and written clever novels in English about the passions and inhibitions of top-hatted immigrants and the neurotic ordeals of their agonized progeny.” Photo: SARA KRULWICH, STF / NYTĮarly in his 2003 memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” Israeli writer Amos Oz kicks Philip Roth in the shins. ![]() The late prolific author whose novels depicted the American dream, sex, death and Jews, is the subject of Blake Bailey’s biography.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |