Roth, who dominated US literature for decades, dies at 85
Personal life afforded him little serenity, but his works are ranked among the best
‘ Iwrite fiction,” warned Philip Milton Roth, “and I’m told it’s autobiography. I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide.”
That half-defensive, angry note and a lifetime as a novelist crafting multiple “fake biographies”, gave Roth, who died on Tuesday aged 85, an enigmatic status for tidy-minded critics.
The novelist who was born March 19, 1933, won intense respect from the moment in the 1960s when he joined Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud in a Jewish troika at the centre of American literature.
Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), sold a more than respectable 12,000 copies in hardback and received the National Book award.
The big one — the Nobel Prize in literature — eluded him, but there can be few American literary careers so richly laurelled, early and late. He was a bestselling writer only once in his career, when Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) sold 420,000 copies in the first 10 weeks after publication.
From his earliest work, Roth’s Jewish readers were uneasy with his ironic view of Jewish life. The Jewish community saw Roth as a wisenheimer — a sharp-tongued young man who had turned his back upon the religion of his fathers.
The publication of his short story Defender of the Faith in 1959 was greeted with a storm of criticism. Rabbis accused Roth of Jewish “self-hatred”. He appeared before a hostile audience at Yeshiva University in 1962.
The experience left the resilient young Roth unrepentant. He wrote of this experience with high comic delight in Portnoy’s Complaint.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, he was the son of Bessie (née Finkel) and Herman Roth, who were themselves the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from eastern Europe.
Philip remembered hearing as a small child the voices of Hitler and Father Charles Coughlin, the Roman Catholic priest whose sermons denouncing communism commanded a large nationwide radio audience. The Roth family listened on the radio to the renomination speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt. “My entire clan ... were devout New Deal Democrats,” he wrote. They were proud citizens of Newark, but lived in an intensely Jewish world.
In two volumes which he disclaimed as autobiography, The Facts (1988) and Patrimony (1991), and in several novels Roth wrote lovingly of his childhood, and of the Newark world of his parents.
Throughout most of his life he held academic appointments at American universities, beginning at the University of Chicago, where he was an instructor in English for two years from 1956. He married Maggie Michaelson in 1959. When he heard nearly a decade later of her death in an automobile accident, Roth’s strongest emotion was relief and surprise: “You’re dead and I didn’t have to do it.”
The two novels he wrote during that marriage, Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967), were serious-minded “literary” explorations of what lay behind the disastrous relationship. He returned to his life with Michaelson in My Life As a Man (1974) and The Facts.
Roth’s personal life afforded him little serenity, but his
The big one — the Nobel Prize in literature — eluded Philip Milton Roth, but there can be few American literary careers so richly laurelled, early and late.
achievement in the 1980s and after represents one of the most remarkable creative moments in American literature. He staked a claim as a postmodernist in The Counterlife (1986) and Operation Shylock. But it was the exuberant, transgressive Mickey Sabbath, a maestro at loss, humiliation, and a sumo wrestler with death in Sabbath’s Theatre (1995), who showed Roth to be a writer of a poignant humanity.
In 2011 he won the Man Booker international award.
When, in 2013, New York magazine assembled a panel of 30 writers to select the greatest American writer, Roth won hands down. That year he was made a commander of the Legion d’honneur.
In 2012, Roth had mentioned, almost as an aside in a French interview, that Nemesis was going to be his last book.
In 2014, he conducted a filmed interview with Alan Yentob for the BBC that he said would be his last public appearance.