Reality sparked his fiction
American author Philip Roth wrote what he knew – his life and milieu – but did so with a universality that touched readers around the world.
PHILIP Roth, who died on Tuesday, was often called the grand man of American letters. The fierce and prolific talent, who achieved fame with the sexually explicit Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969, was 85 when he died of congestive heart failure.
Roth, who lived in New York and Connecticut, was best known for mining the Jewish-American experience in his more than 30 novels, with American Pastoral winning the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Roth said he reached a turning point when he realised he could use his own world as literary raw material, be it his upbringing or the setting of his New Jersey home town.
“You can’t invent out of nothing, or I can’t certainly,” he said in a 2011 documentary. “I need some reality, to rub two sticks of reality together to get a fire of reality.”
But Roth’s giant stature on the post-World War II English language literary scene stems from the universality of his message – in his own words: “I don’t write Jewish, I write American.”
A contemporary of literary giants like Don DeLillo (1936-), Saul Bellow (1915-2005) and Norman Mailer (1923-2007), the late novelist was the doyen of a whole literary era.
He won numerous US literary prizes including two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, three PEN/Faulkner awards, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction – but the Nobel prize evaded him.
He collected the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction in 2011, followed the next year by Spain’s Prince of Asturias award for literature and in 2015, France presented Roth with the insignia of Commander of the Legion of Honor – a laurel the author called “a wonderful surprise”.
Rocking retirement
A prolific essayist and critic as well as a novelist, Roth long managed to sustain his literary output both in terms of quality as well as quantity, exemplified by his widely admired political trilogy: American Pastoral (1997), I Married A Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000).
His final novel, Nemesis ,abouta 1944 polio epidemic in the neighbourhood where he grew up, came out in 2010. Two years later, he stunned the literary world with the announcement that he would no longer write fiction.
“It’s a bit like hearing that Keith Richards has given up rock and roll, or that the Pope is abandoning religion,” the critic James Walton wrote at the time.
But Roth was true to his word and, he claimed, perfectly content with life-after-literature, even though he readily admitted that writing had long served as a way to keep depression at bay.
“I had reached the end. There was nothing more for me to write about,” he told the BBC in 2014. “I set out upon the great task of doing nothing. I’ve had a very good time.”
According to an interview published in the New York Times Book Review magazine in 2014, after announcing his retirement Roth reread all the books he had written “to see whether I’d wasted my time”. His conclusion? He quoted Joe Lewis, the heavyweight boxing champion of the 1930s and 1940s: “I did the best I could with what I had”.
More recently, Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America ,was thrust back into the public eye following the election of US President Donald Trump.
The novel’s alternative American history – which imagines Franklin D. Roosevelt being defeated in 1940 by Charles Lindbergh, a celebrity aviator with pro-Nazi leanings – led some left-wing critics to draw comparisons with Trump’s populist sweep to power.
Roth dismissed the notion of a parallel, but also made clear his disdain for the current occupant of the White House, describing a president “ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognising subtlety or nuance ... and wielding a vocabulary of 77 words”.
The author has repeatedly insisted on a distinct line between fact and fiction in his work, but as he advanced into his 80s poignant reflections on mortality haunted his later novels, including Everyman (2006) and Nemesis (2010).
“The time is running out,” he told an interviewer matter-of-factly back in in 2011. “There’s nothing I can do about that, there’s nothing to be done.”
Reclusive from the start
Philip Milton Roth was born March 19, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey, the grandson of European Jews who were part of the 19th-century wave of immigration to the United States.
Roth earned a bachelor’s degree at Buckle University and a master’s degree in English from the University of Chicago. He dropped out of the doctoral programme in 1959 to write film reviews for The New Republic magazine before publishing his debut work, Goodbye, Columbus, that year aged just 26. The short story collection is a close-to-the-bone look at the materialist values of the Jewish immigrant milieu in which he grew up.
Although the work earned near-universal praise, and won the prestigious 1959 National Book Award, many Jews felt betrayed by what they saw as an unflattering depiction of the Jewish-American experience.
Two novels followed, but it was the third – Portnoy’s Complaint – that brought fame with its comic description of the sexual problems facing a young middle-class Jewish New Yorker burdened with a domineering and possessive mother.
The book topped The New York Times bestseller list for the year and turned its reclusive author into a celebrity – an uncomfortable position that he would later satirise in novels like Zuckerman Unbound
(1981) and Operation Shylock (1993).
Readers have long argued over the true level of autobiography in Roth’s novels and the character Nathan Zuckerman, whose passage from aspiring young writer to socially compromised literary celebrity Roth traced in five novels, has generally been seen as the author’s alter ego.
Roth’s personal life was dragged into the spotlight following his messy breakup with British actress Claire Bloom, who painted a grim picture of life with her ex-husband in her 1996 memoir Leaving A Doll’s House.
In the words of Roth’s contemporary, novelist John Updike, “As the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, she shows him to have been, as their marriage rapidly unravelled, neurasthenic to the point of hospitalisation, adulterous, callously selfish and financially vindictive.”
Reportedly infuriated, Roth exacted revenge by caricaturing Bloom as a poisonous character two years later in I Married A Communist.
Roth taught comparative literature, mostly at the University of Pennsylvania.
He retired from teaching in 1992 as a distinguished professor of literature at New York’s Hunter College. — AFP/Reuters