I had a few things in common with Philip Roth. We’re both Jewish men raised in Essex County, New Jersey—he in the Weequahic neighborhood in the city of Newark, where most of his protagonists were born and a number of his books are set, and I in the neighboring town of South Orange, a pleasant suburb that is rumored to be where the woman who inspired Brenda Patimkin, Neil Klugman’s love interest in the novella Goodbye, Columbus, actually lived. (She was raised in Newstead, the wealthiest neighborhood in town, which, even in the ’90s, was casually referred to as “Jewstead.”) Despite being a bookish weisenheimer, I didn’t encounter Roth until college, when I read Portnoy’s Complaint and then took an life-altering class on Roth and John Updike—never before had I known that literature could be like this, an explosive unraveling of inner thoughts verbalized on the page. Roth soon became my favorite writer, and in the following years I consumed his complete oeuvre.
What made Roth unique? The gleeful vulgarity, for starters. When Seinfeld aired its infamous episode “The Contest” in 1992, the word “masturbation” was never spoken; Portnoy’s Complaint, published in 1969, has a chapter titled “C**T CRAZY.” (The book does not include the asterisks.) It’s obligatory when writing about Roth’s career to mention the piece of liver that Alexander Portnoy masturbates into and then eats with his family for dinner. David Kepesh, Kafkaesquely transformed into a 155-pound mammary gland in The Breast, yells to a nurse, “I get so excited I want to f**k you! I want you to sit on my nipple—with your c**t!” Mickey Sabbath urinates on his dead lover’s grave at the end of Sabbath’s Theater. The headline of the New Yorker‘s initial post on Roth’s death called him the “Seminal American Novelist”—double entendre intended? The (possibly) dirty pun was changed the next day, a prudishness alien to the Rothian spirit.
Roth blew up the Jewish-American narrative. He is the most important Jewish-American writer, full stop, and few have shaped modern Jewish-American consciousness like he has. The stories in Goodbye, Columbus, particularly one in which a malingering Jewish army private seeks to have his Jewish sergeant excuse his behavior, caused consternation in the Jewish community, leading to charges of being a self-hating Jew or even an anti-Semite. The attacks backfired and gave Roth his lifelong theme of what it means to be Jewish in America. While much of what he wrote about Jews was satirically critical—Portnoy says, “weep for your own pathetic selves, why don’t you, sucking and sucking on that sour grape of a religion! Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews!”—Roth’s most tender work is Patrimony, a loving biography of his father (upon whom many readers wrongly assumed the constantly constipated Jack Portnoy was based) and the rest of his striving Jewish family. Later in life, after he won every literary award there is (save the Nobel), the Jewish community that had turned its back embraced him as an eminence.
Roth blurred the line between fact and fiction. He became more identified with his fictional protagonists than any American author since Hemingway; he invited these comparisons, of course, by deeply mining his biography for material. The lightning bolt of Portnoy, a national sensation, led many to suspect that he was writing thinly veiled autobiography. On The Tonight Show, the writer Jacqueline Susann joked of Roth: “I’d like to meet him, but I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.” The theme of identity would emerge most strongly in the Zuckerman novels, starting with The Ghost Writer in 1979, in which Roth created an alter ego whose biography most closely resembled his own: Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish novelist born in Newark whose early short stories attract the opprobrium of the Jewish community, and who later writes a sex-drenched smash called Carnovsky that brings him national fame and infamy. Roth’s postmodern playfulness flowered in the multiple realities of The Counterlife and his memoir The Facts, where the the last chapter is a letter “from” Zuckerman critiquing the rest of the book we’ve just read and arguing that it should not be published. His most gloriously metafictional work is also my personal favorite, Operation Shylock, in which Roth, writing as himself, goes to Israel to confront a doppelganger who has assumed his identity in order to promote “Diasporism,” an anti-Zionist plan encouraging Israeli Jews to return to their European nations of origin. The novel mixes fiction and references to Roth’s previous work with real-world events like the First Intifada and the trial of a Ukrainian-American man accused of being a WWII concentration camp guard.
Roth fused the literary and the comic. He may not have been the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century, but he was the funniest. Portnoy is still shockingly funny and prefigures Seinfeld and Judd Apatow’s films in its close analysis and mockery of the male sexual id. Our Gang, published in 1971, is a viciously hilarious satire of Richard Nixon, his administration, abortion, and the Vietnam War; it ends with Nixon in Hell, campaigning against Satan to be the next Devil.
Roth had political foresight. He recognized that Nixon was a fake and a fool years before Watergate. 2004’s The Plot Against America can be read as a reaction to the national post-9/11 paranoia. His phrase “indigenous American berserk,” from American Pastoral, perfectly encapsulates the triumph of Donald Trump.
Roth made illness, the decay of the body, and death the overarching themes of his late work. Mickey Sabbath can no longer work as a puppeteer because of arthritis; Zuckerman suffers from impotence after prostate surgery; Everyman begins at its unnamed protagonist’s funeral and circles back through his life and medical history, ending with his death; Indignation is narrated from the afterlife by a young man killed in the Korean War; and his final book, Nemesis, is about a polio outbreak in WWII-era Newark.
Years ago, during a panel discussion featuring Roth and Harold Bloom, a heckler in the audience started to berate Bloom. The famous literary critic (who relayed this anecdote to an undergraduate classroom in the mid-aughts) was shaken by the disturbance, and, as the panelists walked off-stage, Roth turned to reassure him. It’s okay, Roth said, for “we are here to be insulted.” The final, ultimate, and universal insult is death, which met Roth last week at age 85. I do not think that his contribution to American culture will ever be equaled. His work remains vital today, his characters still graspingly alive.
