Philip Roth didn’t need a Nobel Prize but he deserved one
It is just as well there will be no Nobel Prize in literature this year. Philip Roth is dead.
The Nobel judges passed over the United States’ most formidable novelist for decades even as he published one classic after another, from Goodbye, Columbus to The Plot Against America. As thundering obituaries have noted around the world, Roth won every other honour a writer could win, sometimes — in the case of the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award — two or three times.
If he cared about the Swedes’ snub, he didn’t show it. In 2009, on a tour of the newly christened Philip Roth Plaza in New Jersey, he said, “Newark is my Stockholm.”
But more than honours, Roth, who died this week at the age of 85, had readers, generations of them, the result of his prodigious skill and extraordinary productivity. He survived Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, and his work will probably outlive theirs, too. That his output was uneven is no mark against him. He worked long enough and fearlessly enough to produce a few misses among the masterpieces.
Funnier than John Updike, angrier than Don DeLillo, Roth was a master of the comic novel, the historical novel, the political novel, the philosophical novel. And he made it much harder to eat liver.
In many ways, he anticipated the great currents of our age — smartly, unapologetically, sometimes furiously.
Long before we all started arguing about identity politics, Roth bristled at the suggestion his Jewish background should in any way delimit the nature of his fiction. In 1959, when the New Yorker published Defender of the Faith, about a Jewish sergeant in the US Army, Roth was denounced for betraying his people, for being a self-hating Jew. One offended reader — speaking for many others — wrote to him: “You have done as much harm as all the organised anti-Semitic organisations have done to make people believe that all Jews are cheats, liars, connivers.” Roth would give no quarter to such claims nor to the implication that an artist carries some extra-moral burden to defend the public image of his ethnic identity.
Roth never took to social media, but in a way he was the creator of America’s most complex avatar. His recurring character, the famous novelist Nathan Zuckerman, gave him a chance to play with his persona long before Facebook enabled the rest of us to manipulate public versions of ourselves.
As he once told the Paris Review, “Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it.”
Zuckerman was a persona that allowed Roth to critique and participate in the ever-widening divisions of his life and ours.
In 2000, Roth told the New Yorker’s David Remnick, “I don’t believe in death, I don’t experience the time as limited.” If only.
At least we still have his remarkable novels, short stories and essays. Reading them again now, as we mourn the loss of Roth, we can experience anew his ferocious independence, his buoyant wit and especially his determination to illuminate the tragicomedy of human existence.