I've found Philip Roth to be a rewarding writer to enjoy for as long as I've read his books. I began with Goodbye, Columbus, his first published novella and compilation of (mostly) previously-published stories. It's certainly appropriate that the first person who recommended him to me was a friend of mine from Hebrew school! Reading Roth back then--in the late 1950s--was certainly edgy in terms of the Jewish establishment in the U.S., which made it all the more appealing. Roth became the classic writer who included all sorts of intensely Jewish matters, cultural rather than religious, but which the usually pompous leadership aimed to prevent exposure to the outside world: the goyim.
Not only was his prose edgy but supremely funny. And his confidence of the Jewish world--the Newark where he grew up, in particular--was spot on, without defense or euphemism. I followed Roth's long literary career largely through his novels and occasional writings about writing. His first novel, Letting Go, which was generally regarded as his first only if Goodbye, Columbus was a novella, which most readers instead described as a novel, was slightly disappointing, as second novels often are. It was long and mostly tracked his miserable first marriage.
In his next novel, When She Was Good, he ventured outside the Jewish world for the first time. Although it was a perfectly adequate novel, it lacked the knowing confidence of his writing about Jews. He also depicted a leading character who was a cold and mostly unsympathetic woman. Rather than in his earlier work, it was this portrayal that led to the initial charges that he was a misogynist. No one argued that he was anti-Christian, because he was far from the first to write critical fiction about the dominant group in mid-century American society.
Roth's greatest popular success and scandalous accomplishment was Portnoy's Complaint, in which he dove into the sexual openness of the 1960s to convey a "nice Jewish boy" with a background similar to his own who enjoyed masturbatory as well as kinky sex with a variety of non-Jewish female partners. It was the talk of New York from the first appearance of a long section in The New Yorker, and it both brought Roth fame and riches, or, in some circles, infamy. He was at the top of his game, dealing with sex and the coming of age of his prototypical "nice Jewish boy."
He wrote about 27 more books after that, and I read quite a few of them. I tended to pass on the ones that declared themselves autobiographical or semiautobiographical, like The Facts, Patrimony, and The Counterlife. But I savored the Zuckerman novels, especially the novella, The Ghost Writer, with which he introduced his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, and which features one of his wonderfully outrageous conceits, when his narrator imagines that a charming young woman having an affair of sorts with an older, famed Jewish novelist might indeed be the real Anne Frank.
Roth was at the height of his game when he produced the "American trilogy" of American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, and The Human Stain. The first 95 pages of the first are a magnificent riff on how a Jewish-owned glove business originated, grew, and declined in Newark. In the second, he dipped into politics by covering the McCarthy era, and the third, where he also entered the lists against what became "cancel culture" and racial "passing." In Sabbath's Theater, which may have been his favorite of all his fiction, he presented a character who was more engaged in offbeat or kinky behavior than even the more celebrated Portnoy.
The political satire, Our Gang, was skippable, although I did read this rather ham-handed account of the Nixon gang. I never had enough interest to check out The Breast or other such explorations. His last novels were briefer, and in my view, a return to his skilled fiction--books like Indignation, Everyman, and Nemesis. Although I enjoyed them all, they were lesser works to some degree because he could not develop his stories as he had in earlier novels.
I have not intended to dismiss The Plot Against America, his historical novel in which he speculates on a Nazi-sympathetic U.S. administration that takes power when Charles Lindbergh unexpectedly defeats FDR. I didn't read it for years until it was made into a TV series, and then I found that he finally had succeeded in a political book. In its own way, it is a modern classic. When he was around 80, Roth decided to retire from writing. I felt that his last novel, Nemesis, about a polio outbreak during World War II in Newark, of course, was a good one and that he did quit at near, if not at, the top of his form.
I happened to see a new biography of him, Philip Roth, by a Canadian professor, Ira Nadel, in a local bookstore and picked it up, It is lengthy and so far, I don't think it is successful as a literary biography by Claudia Roth Pierpont that was published within the last year or two. I did not realize that the authorized biography by Blake Bailey was imminent, until I read a review of both Nadel's and Bailey's bios in The N.Y. Review of Books. This review blasted Nadel and praised Bailey's work (and didn't give much attention to a memoir by an old friend of Roth's, also published now). Then two days ago, the N.Y. Times printed a negative review of Bailey's book, which won't be published until next Tuesday, in the dubious tradition of the publishing business--reviews tend to appear days or weeks before a book is published and available for purchase.
So I probably will look at both and take my choice after I pays my money. Roth, who engineered the production of a 10-volume series of his collected works in The Library of America, and truly tried to control his biographer, at least his authorized one, should be pleased wherever he is now at the attention he is and will continue to be getting. To my mind, he remains a fascinating, incredibly amusing, and trenchant chronicler of American-Jewish culture.
Those short stories appended to Goodbye, Columbus remain among his best work. The first to get huge attention was "Defender of the Faith," about a Jewish U.S. Army sergeant forced by his moral code to act against a young Jewish soldier who tries to play on their religious-ethnic connection. It was published in The New Yorker in the late 1940s and not surprisingly stirred the pot as the rabbis and the machers of the Jewish community demanded that "this man be silenced." I doubt they realized then that they were mightily helping Roth on his way to fame and fortune.
o
