Philip Roth, towering novelist who explored Jewish life and America, dies
NEWYORK:PHILIP Roth, the prolific, protean and often blackly comic novelist who was a preeminent figure in 20th century literature, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 85.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said writer Judith Thurman, a close friend. Roth had homes in Manhattan and Connecticut.
In the course of a very long career, Roth took on many guises — mainly versions of himself — in the exploration of what it means to be an American, a Jew, a writer, a man. He was a champion of Eastern European novelists like Ivan Klima and Bruno Schulz, and also a passionate student of US history and the American vernacular. And more than just about any other writer of his time he was tireless in his exploration of male sexuality.
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, an age when many writers are winding down, 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, almost against his will sometimes, he was drawn again and again to themes of Jewish identity, anti-semitism and the Jewish experience in America.
Roth’s favourite vehicle for exploring this repertory was himself, or rather one of several fictional alter egos he deployed as a go-between, negotiating the tricky boundary between autobiography and invention and deliberately blurring the boundaries between real life and fiction. 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.