philip roth is the GOAT

"I am young, drunk (on sex), and can never die"

I once went on a date with a girl in a deceased coffee shop in Harvard Square called Cafe Pamplona, where you paid for the low ceiling ambiance and surly baristas because it seemed like the price of being a disaffected intellectual, and who could put a price on that when you are twenty-five? The talk turned to books we loved, and this curly haired girl from the suburbs of Boston emphatically told me that her mom told her never to date a boy who said that Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint was his favorite book. I nodded in agreement and had to rack my brain for the next novel on my list.

Philip Roth, who passed away in 2018, is back. A biography is like an encore presentation, when there used to be Broadway shows: one last chance to clap, hoot and holler, one final opportunity to take aim and launch a tomato. As the concluding number of Hamilton puts it, “who lives who dies who tells your story?” It is the final part that equation can be the most tricky.

Sometimes, biographies canonize. Other times, as with Patrick French’s demolition of Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul, they can eviscerate the man, if not the work. Biographies about writers always have the strange effect of turning authors into characters, as if at the end of a life of writing and typing they go through the looking glass and become someone else’s material.

Roth is the latest to get the blockbuster biography treatment of Blake Bailey, who has also preserved John Cheever and Richard Yates in fluently written literary amber. Roth has proved nearly as adept at generating buzz from beyond the grave as he was in life, with the 800 plus page biography launching an armada of reviews, retrospectives, and lukewarm takes on the life of Roth’s novels and the novel of his life.

Part of the pleasure of the book is watching Roth grow into a master, braiding the material of his childhood in Newark with what he could raid from a life that was glitzy (more affairs than you can shake a Pulitzer Prize at), tormented, (disastrous marriages) and banal (a persistently bad back and endless days in Litchfield, Connecticut, working through drafts) in equal measure.

Another share of joy comes from hearing the click of his typewriter set against a clamoring and frothy midcentury literary world webbed into all kinds of competitions and collaborations, funded by a host of fellowships and set of artistic slush funds that have gone the way of the mastodon.

If you were going to conscript a set of extras for your life, you could do worse than Saul Bellow, John Updike, William Styron, and a cameo from Jackie Kennedy, with whom Roth hooked up once and then was too intimidated to call her again. He didn’t have enough good suits to date her, he figured. Roth had fewer compunctions about sleeping with Alice Denham, to this day still the only woman to appear in an issue of Playboy as both centerfold and byline: her Sleeping with Bad Boys covers the ground you’d expect, except if all bad boys picked up National Book Awards during their mischief making.

Roth matters because of his books, of course. They will be read forever, because at their best they feel outrageously vital, decades out. The Ghostwriter is a gem, American Pastoral rates not far beyond Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn in the long running derby for the Great American Novel. The Counterlife and Operation Shylock stake claims to be the best novels written about Israel, and they were created by a boy from New Jersey. Sabbath’s Theater is so strong that it can feel like the unexpected sequel to King Lear. Goodbye, Columbus and Conversion of the Jews still rankle Jewish American pieties, a half century later. The Human Stain is still the most powerful treatment of campus pathologies and cancel culture we have, written nearly a third of a century ago. And of course, Portnoy’s Complaint remains fresh in the areas that most suffer from time’s ravages: humor and shock value.

Two non-fiction essays, “Talking About Jews” and “Writing About Jews,” brought the fierceness of a young writer’s novelistic gaze to bear on the still-vital questions of the relationship between artist and tribe, writers and critics, the Jewish people and the American promise. These essays chart everything to come, but Roth was the first one in the sea, before anyone knew if the waters would part.

He was wicked in the service of wisdom and managed to refuse identity politics even as he mined the richness of the ethnic in its most imaginatively lucrative vein. This wild discipline smuggled the apocrypha of Jewish experience into the canon of Jewish letters.

Bailey’s biography shows that Roth’s life might matter just as much as his books, and the lesson from the life is that artistic ambition and wanting to eat the world and live outrageously and vibrantly are not opposed. Roth was always alchemizing the stuff of his life into his art: his greatest promiscuity was with his fictional material. Writing was a serious thing, but life didn’t have to be. He loved words and he loved women, and only fools would think that one passion impinged or invalidated the other. The monk devoted to his craft and the bon vivant dedicated to the electric effect of beauty and desire coexisted in Roth. If you are serious about the right things, his life seems to say, you’ll have the most fun along the way.

There is definitely a strain of Roth’s writing and living that found its generational groove in the 1960’s, where his unabashed embrace of sex and became mainstream rather than just avant garde. But Roth remained a child of the 40’s, and there is about him none of the dissolution and drift that characterized the gurus and flower petaled prophets of that decade. He was interested in the pull of a short skirt and a blonde bob, but also in the opposing force of tradition and conformity. Philip Roth was the best of us because there was a moment around the hinge of the middle of the last century, when Jewish parents still remembered the shtetl, that he dared to be the worst.

His heroic defense of the artists right to create ring true against the efforts of the rabbis and community pooh bahs to shame him into conformity (Rabbi Emmanuel Rackman of Yeshiva University once mused “what is being done to silence this man”) but it was that very opposition that homed his art to a serrated edge. He only could stage the most amazing literary jailbreak because the prison was still standing. He was the dark haired fox in the ruins of the Temple, cackling and free.

Somewhere, he is waiting for us to work and laugh and yes, shtup, as much as he did. Nothing less than the next great novel and a night with the most beautiful woman you’ll ever hope to see depend on it.

A

P.S. check out my piece on Israeli Independence Day, here.

N.B. This entry was composed before upsetting allegations against Bailey came to light. You can read more here.