Towering novelist explored lust, Jewish life and America
Pulitzer Prize-winner was third living writer in Library of America
Philip Roth, the prolific, protean and often blackly comic novelist whose creations included David Kepesh, an academic who turns into an exquisitely sensitive 155-pound female breast, and Alexander Portnoy, a teenager so libidinous that he has sex with both his baseball mitt and the family dinner, died on Tuesday. He was 85.
Roth was the last of the great white males: the triumvirate of writers — Saul Bellow and John Updike were the others — who towered over American letters in the second half of the 20th century. Outliving both and borne aloft by an extraordinary second wind, Roth wrote more novels than either of them.
In 2005 he became the third living writer to have his books enshrined in the Library of America.
“Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now,” Roth once said. “I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.”
The Nobel Prize eluded Roth, but he won most of the other top honours: two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International Prize.
In his 60s, he produced an exceptional sequence of historical novels — American Pastoral, The Human Stain and I Married a Communist — a product of his personal re-engagement with America and American themes. And starting with Everyman in 2006, when he was 73, he kept up a relentless book-a-year pace, publishing works that while not necessarily major were nevertheless fiercely intelligent and sharply observed.
Roth was often lumped together with Bellow and Bernard Malamud as part of the “Hart, Schaffner & Marx of American letters,” but he resisted the label. “The epithet American-Jewish writer has no meaning for me,” he said. “If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.”
And yet, he was drawn again and again to writing about themes of Jewish identity, antiSemitism and the Jewish experience in America.
Nine of Roth’s novels are narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist whose career closely parallels that of his creator. Three more are narrated by David Kepesh, a writerly academic who shares some of Roth’s preoccupations, women especially. And sometimes Roth dispensed with the disguise altogether, or seemed to.
The protagonist of Operation Shylock is a character named Philip Roth, who is being impersonated by another character. At the centre of The Plot Against America, a book that invents an America where Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election and initiates a secret pogrom against Jews, is a New Jersey family named Roth that resembles the author’s.
“Making fake biography, false history, concocting a halfimaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life,” Roth told Hermione Lee in a 1984 interview in The Paris Review. “There has to be some pleasure in this life, and that’s it.”
Roth’s other great theme was sex, or male lust, which in his books is both a life force and a principle of rage and disorder. It is sex, the uncontrollable need to have it, that torments poor, guilt-ridden Portnoy, probably Roth’s most famous character, who desperately wants to “be bad — and to enjoy it.” And Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist of Sabbath’s Theater, one of Roth’s major latecareer novels, is in many ways Portnoy grown old but still in the grip of lust and longing.
Some writers “pretend to be more loveable than they are and some pretend to be less,” he told Lee.
“Beside the point. Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.”