Philip Roth unbound
Another side of one of America’s greatest postwar writers
Philip Roth’s new collection of nonfiction consists of three chronologically arranged sections: The first contains selections from Mr. Roth’s previously published “Reading Myself and Others” (1985); the second reprints the volume “Shop Talk” (2001) in its entirety; and the third runs through 2014, including several speeches that have not previously been published. “Why Write?” also includes a short preface, in which Mr. Roth misleads readers in at least two ways.
First, he tells us that the early pieces in the collection are from an “embattled” period of his career and are included only for the sake of the record. True, the pieces in “Why Write?” show a sort of mellowing on Mr. Roth’s part. But there’s also his screed against Wikipedia in 2012, and later interviews make it clear that he never learned to love the format, even if he does seem less combative. Plus, Mr. Roth’s readers know that his later fiction remained embattled at its core, and that the struggles that drove Nathan Zuckerman into the woods in the 1997 novel “American Pastoral” closely resemble those that the author diagnosed in his 1961 essay “Writing American Fiction.” Mr. Roth is only marginally less embattled in his later works, and we should all be thankful for it.
He ends the preface by repeating a line from “Sabbath’s Theater” with which he ends the book: “Here I am.” Mr. Roth repeats this line, he writes, because “Why Write?” brings him “out from behind the disguises and inventions and artifices of the novel.” We’re invited, in other words, to believe that this is the “real” Roth, as opposed to the fake one we see in his fiction. Again, this is only somewhat true.
Mr. Roth’s touching tribute to his high school teacher Robert Lowenstein provides facts about Mr. Roth’s life that we couldn’t know from his fiction, despite the fact that Mr. Lowenstein was the model for Murray Ringold in “I Married a Communist.” But in their published form, these essays, speeches and interviews are still part of what Mr. Roth liked to refer to as “the written world,” so they still offer the same opportunities for concealment and manipulation (and vulnerability and honesty) that fiction does.
Rather than view these pieces as Mr. Roth stepping out from behind his fiction, it’s better to read them in dialogue with it. “Why Write?” helps illustrate continuities in his work more clearly, for example his ongoing concerns with freedom and belonging, which Mr. Roth explored primarily through Judaism in his early fiction and American patriotism after that. Friendship was important to the author, and the reprinted interviews with friends deepen the complicated pictures of friendship that he paints in “The Human Stain” and elsewhere. And the new volume serves as a good reminder of Mr. Roth’s comic abilities, even if readers are less likely to laugh out loud than they are while reading “Portnoy’s Complaint” or “Our Gang.”
“Why Write?” also clarifies aspects of Mr. Roth’s work that can only be achieved in fiction. The collection’s final piece, titled “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction,” comes from an address given by Mr. Roth at a celebration for his 80th birthday in 2013. He ends the speech by reading a passage from “Sabbath’s Theater” in which Mickey Sabbath remembers experiences with family members while at their grave sites. It’s a wonderful passage, full of the emotional depth and physical particularity that marks Mr. Roth’s best work. But it can only hint at the power of his fiction and the resources it offers for thinking about human life, including attentiveness, sensitivity, intelligence and curiosity.
Philip Roth never worked with nonfictional forms enough to develop their potential in similar ways, but “Why Write?” still stands as an important contribution to one of the most important bodies of writing in the postwar era, even if that’s mostly because it might persuade readers to pick up a novel.