Roth reveled in pushing his readers
own massive Bildungsroman — when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man. The clapboard farmhouse was at the end of an unpaved road twelve hundred feet up in the Berkshires, yet the figure who emerged from the study to bestow a ceremonious greeting wore a gabardine suit, a knitted blue tie clipped to a white shirt by an unadorned silver clasp, and well-brushed ministerial black shoes that made me think of him stepping down from a shoeshine stand rather than from the high altar of art.”
Roth was a writer who lived by his sentences and his style, and here it is: dense lyricism. Narrative authority. The influence of his own hero, Henry James, was always just under the surface. Here, too, are the loud footsteps of Fitzgerald that could be heard from the opening pages of his first and best book, “Goodbye, Columbus,” on through — the loquacious pile-up of adjectives (“well-brushed ministerial black shoes”), the subtle compression and meaning that memory brings (“more than twenty years ago.”) And in that first book there was also the more immediate influence of Salinger, his humor and his italics and his ponderousness
(“You invited me, Brenda,” Neil Klugman tells his love interest twice in four lines of dialogue). Above all is just the precision, the proper nouns and compound German nouns and the painterly attention to detail.
Which is all just fine, but here’s how I suspect the greatest writer of his generation would want to be remembered on the morning after his death: the 22-page footnote in his best book “Sabbath’s Theater” (he had a lot of best books, Philip Roth). The footnote is comprised solely of the transcript of a shockingly vulgar phonesex call. It is not reprintable in a newspaper, and would look like a page out of “Finnegans Wake” presented here:
“Now **** your **** again. **** your **** . Ummm.
And tell me what you want. Tell me what you most want.
I want you on top of my back. Your **** inside me. Oh, God. Oh, God, I want you.
What do you want, (bleep?) Tell me what you want.
I want your **** . I want it everywhere. I want your hands everywhere. I want your hands on my legs. On my stomach. My back. On my **** , squeezing my **** .
Where do you want my **** ?
Oh, I want it in my mouth.”
And so on. The italics are still there, but they are definitively not Salingerian. Like so much of his work once he’d gotten out from under the thumb of his heroes, once he’d moved beyond James and Fitzgerald and Salinger, it was provocative. I suspect Roth would revel in a writer sitting here, trying to think about how even to quote from that 22-page footnote in a newspaper. It is at once a deliberate provocation and a subtle expansion of what we think of as literature: a reproduction of how we use language now, a way of forcing the reader to consider what he’s even reading.
Whether it was Alexander Portnoy and his infamous prurient piece of raw liver, Mickey Sabbath’s phone sex tape or Merry Lvov naked in a hotel room in Roth’s best book, “American Pastoral,” Roth was always pushing hard how far he could provoke us. I’d guess he would have liked the praise of his lyricism, his Jamesean narration and Fitzgeraldian control of style. But this morning? This morning he’d want us quoting the unquotable opening line of “Sabbath’s Theater”: “Either forswear f—ing others or the affair is over.”
One provocation Roth always had in mind was the ultimate provocation: death. “Sabbath’s Theater” takes its epigraph from “The Tempest”: “Every third thought shall be my grave,” a line from Prospero in a book in which Mickey Sabbath both gives King Lear’s madness soliloquy on a subway car “one stop north of Astor Place,” and later masturbates on his dead lover’s grave. His late novels “Everyman” and “Exit Ghost” were suffused with inevitable death. There is a concept in Judaism, a value system Roth was always grappling with and provoking, called the Lamedvavniks. The idea is that there are 36 just men on Earth at all times, keeping balance in the universe. Without even one of them, that balance would be shaken. Philip Roth would have hated to think he was one of them. The first day on Earth in 85 years without him, we’d be remiss to think he wasn’t.
Daniel Torday is the author of the novel “The Last Flight of Poxl West” and the novella “The Sensualist,” both winners of the National Jewish Book Award. His second novel, “Boomer1,” will be published by St. Martin’s Press in September.