Influential novelist Roth dies at 85
Philip Roth was a prolific, protean and often blackly comic novelist who was a pre-eminent figure in 20th century literature.
Philip Roth, the prolific, protean and often blackly comic novelist who was a pre-eminent figure in 20th century literature, died Tuesday night at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 85.
Writer Judith Thurman, a close friend, said the cause was congestive heart failure. 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 American 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.
Late-career push
His creations include Alexander Portnoy, a teenager so libidinous he has sex with both his baseball mitt and the family dinner, and David Kepesh, a professor who turns into an exquisitely sensitive 155-pound female breast.
The Nobel Prize eluded Roth, but he won most of the other top honors: 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, a time of life 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. Their theme in one way or another was the ravages of age and mortality itself, and in publishing them he seemed to be defiantly staving off his own decline.
Roth was often lumped together with Saul 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.”
Blurring the boundaries
Roth’s favorite vehicle for exploring this repertoire 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.
The protagonist of “Operation Shylock” is a character named Philip Roth, who is being impersonated by another character, who stole Roth’s identity. At the center 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 in every particular.
Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark on March 19, 1933, the younger of two sons.
He graduated from Bucknell, magna cum laude, in 1954 and won a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he was awarded an M.A. in 1955.
Roth had begun to write and publish short stories by then, and in 1959 he won a Houghton Mifflin Fellowship to publish what became his first collection, “Goodbye, Columbus.” It won the National Book Award in 1960 but was denounced — in an inkling of trouble to come — by some influential rabbis, who objected to the portrayal of the worldly, assimilated Patimkin family in the title novella.
“When She Was Good” was based in part on the life and family of Margaret Martinson Williams, with whom Roth had entered a calamitous relationship in 1959. Williams, who was divorced and had a son and a daughter, met Roth while she was waiting tables in Chicago, and she tricked him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant.They separated in 1963, but Williams refused to divorce, and she remained a vexatious presence in his life until she died in a car crash in 1968.
Autobiographical years
Roth’s autobiographical phase began in 1974 with “My Life as a Man,” which he said was probably the least factually altered of his books; it continued with the Zuckerman trilogy — “The Ghost Writer” (1979), “Zuckerman Unbound” (1981) and “The Anatomy Lesson” (1983) — which examined the authorial vocation and even the nature of writing itself.
Roth had been spending half the year in London with actress Claire Bloom, with whom he began living in 1976. They married in 1990 but divorced four years later. In 1996, Bloom published a memoir, “Leaving the Doll’s House,” in which she depicted him as a misogynist and control freak, so self-involved that he refused to let her daughter, from her marriage to actor Rod Steiger, live with them because she bored him.