THE GENIUS OF SEX AND DEATH

Author’s intense wit masked a deep seriousness

When Anthony Lane reviewed the screen adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Humbling, he posed an apt question: “How do you film an exclamation mark?” No filmmaker has yet found an analogue of the Rothian momentum — of the velocity of thought that electrified his prose. He wrote sustained rants from the analyst’s couch and private monologues to the bathroom mirror, manic fantasies of uninhibited candour and grievances choked with bile.

Although serious, precise, and aggressively intellectual, Roth wrote every one of his 27 novels with a lunatic intensity, channelling with deftness and wit the hysterical delirium of man’s secret psyche. Or, as he puts it in the final lines of his opus, Portnoy’s Complaint: “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh !!!!! ”

Now that he is gone — he passed away Tuesday night of congestive heart failure at the age of 85 — we may never see such frenzied raving energy in literature again.

Roth, born into a working-class Jewish-American family in Newark, New Jersey, made his auspicious, National Book Award-winning debut with the novella Goodbye, Columbus. It opens with the narrator and hero, a young Jew from Newark named Neil, describing his first sight of the ravishing Brenda Patimkin: emerging wet from a pool, she “caught the bottom of her suit between thumb and index finger and flicked what flesh had been showing back where it belonged. My blood jumped.” That quickening would set the pulse of Roth’s work for the next 50 years.

But there would be another decade of stalling and fumbling before the coup that would secure Roth’s reputation. Portnoy, in its mad attacks of panic and paroxysms of ribald lunacy, was what you might call an ideal application of irrepressible talent: the book’s frantic intersection of death, sex, and the Jewish-American experience marked the territory of Roth’s art, and indeed the psycho-social landscape he would continue to explore in fiction with exhaustive concentration. It also made him an overnight celebrity — and cause celebre.

Might it have been luck? It seemed that way to some, for a while: After Portnoy came three juvenile, almost unreadable trivial novels dashed off in quick succession. The third, The Great American Novel, is a 400-page gag involving major league baseball conceived with the scope and sweep of a mock-epic.

Only a genius could have written a book as bad as The Great American Novel. And only a book as bad as The Great American Novel, digested and expelled by its satisfied author, could have liberated that genius from dithering and redirected it back toward fruitful and worthy use. The use was one Nathan Zuckerman, an intimate literary alter-ego and a creative blank slate that would become one of the chief vehicles of Roth’s brilliance.

Zuckerman is introduced, in rudimentary form, as the creation of yet another ego, Peter Tarnopol, whose tumultuous adventures as a harried Jewish-American novelist are the foundation of 1974’s My Life As A Man. Tarnopol is, in his own words, “dangling over a ravine,” as “bereft of will as a zombie” except “the will to be done with life.” Roth makes Tarnopol’s despair uproarious, naturally — all the more extraordinary when you consider that his despair was Roth’s own.

The novel features perhaps the most memorably horrendous female character in Roth’s fiction — and their multitude remains a critical sticking point among his detractors — the screeching, wailing Maureen, a hardcore firebrand who wields “the spike of a highheeled shoe” in one of the “10 to 15 quarrels” she mounts daily, claiming she’s pregnant anytime Peter threatens to leave. Roth based her on his first wife.

ONLY A GENIUS COULD HAVE WRITTEN A BOOK AS BAD AS THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL.

His habit of making fictional fodder of his every catastrophe and transgression reached its zenith in the Zuckerman novels. Indeed, life for Roth became in this period the exclusive source of his inspiration. What does a young writer owe the real-life people he writes about? See Zuckerman circa 1979, in The Ghost Writer. What’s it like to write a wildly successful and controversially salacious novel? Zuckerman Unbound concerns the publication of Nathan’s familiar novel Carnovsky. What’s the JewishAmerican author’s relationship like with Israel? Read The Counterlife.

Zuckerman isn’t merely a tool for self-reflection, but a vantage from which to observe the lives and interests of others: as curious and distant narrator he presides over everything from the thwarted promise of the American dream and the turbulence fostered by radicals (the subject of American Pastoral, one of Roth’s masterpieces) to the repercussions of McCarthyism (I Married a Communist) and the complex pressures of enlightened group-think on those who stray outside the party line (The Human Stain).

The sprawling vision of these works are testaments to Roth’s deep seriousness — their committed inquiries into the heart of American life prove he was always engaged with the outside world even as he obsessed over the hyperpersonal.

And if there were any doubt Roth’s energy survived the march of time, one need only read Sabbath’s Theater. This novel, about a crusty, horny, obstinate puppeteer with a dead mistress and death wish, is every ounce as vigorous and frenetic as Portnoy’s Complaint, though even more fixated on the grim and macabre.

Look no further for the humour Roth felt for fate. “Hallmark should sell a card,” old Sabbath muses, deliberating about what to write in his suicide note. “For anybody who loves a joke, suicide is indispensable. Think about it. There is no more thoroughly amusing way to go. A man who wants to die. A living being choosing death. That’s entertainment.”