Birthday: Philip Roth, whose books may or may not be about Philip Roth, whether or not he says so.

Philip Milton Roth (1933-  )
Author

One of his recurring characters- and alter ego- Nathan Zuckerman, says, "I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we're reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it ?"

Since springing onto the American literary scene with Goodbye, Columbus, at 26, Philip Roth spent half a century administering biting, stinging lessons. After his wunderkind days came a decade sharp, satirical works (Portnoy’s Complaint, 1969 led the way), Roth explored the nature of American and Jewish identities in his Zuckerman novels before turning, in his 60s, to a remarkable series of historical counterfactuals and recreations (The Human Stain, American Pastoral, The Plot Against America, and is revenge on his ex-wife Claire Bloom’s tell-all memoir, I Married A Communist). His writing is vivid, fantastic, playful, and biting, by turns. Of a character in American Pastoral, he limned a man’s life in four sentences:

Mr. Levov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakeable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.

The last half decade he has been slowly withdrawing from public life: no books since 2010, no interviews after 2014. When you're eighty and have all the big gongs but one, what else is there to prove except that one is still around? As Robert McCrum put it in The Guardian,

Usually, a cocktail of vanity, optimism, and defiance, spiked with raw economic necessity, keeps old writers in the game long after they should have bowed out. Roth has beaten the odds. When challenged with his 2004 statement that he "could not conceive of a life without writing", he replies: "I was wrong. I had reached the end. There was nothing more for me to write about." With a flash of candour, he adds: "I was fearful that I'd have nothing to do. I was terrified in fact, but I knew there was no sense continuing. I was not going to get any better. And why get worse ? And so … 

"I set out upon the great task of doing nothing. I've had a very good time over the last three or four years." 

Roth grew up in Newark, where many of his novels are set. After Bucknell and the University of Chicago, he hit a homerun on his first at-bat, and never looked back. In between his 32 books he taught at The University of Iowa, Princeton and The University of Pennsylvania. And he collected awards: two National Book Awards; 2 National Book Critics Circle Awards; 3 PEN/Faulkner Prizes; a Pulitzer, 2 Booker nominations, The National Humanities Medal; the Prince of Asturias Prize, the French Legion of Honor, the Kafka Prize. A 2006 New York Review of Books poll of the best fiction of the last 25 years included six novels by Roth. He’s had six made into hit movies. Seven of them are in the Library of America Series.

Roth’s productivity is all the more remarkable given the trouble had had writing. In a 1984 Paris Review interview, he explained,

Beginning a book is unpleasant. I’m entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything. I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it—that’s what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book. I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book.

INTERVIEWER

How much of a book is in your mind before you start?

ROTH

What matters most isn’t there at all. I don’t mean the solutions to problems, I mean the problems themselves. You’re looking, as you begin, for what’s going to resist you. You’re looking for trouble. Sometimes in the beginning uncertainty arises not because the writing is difficult, but because it isn’t difficult enough. Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

INTERVIEWER

Must you have a beginning? Would you ever begin with an ending?

ROTH

For all I know I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it’s still even around.

INTERVIEWER

What happens to those hundred or so pages that you have left over? Do you save them up?

ROTH

I generally prefer never to see them again.

INTERVIEWER

Do you work best at any particular time of the day?

ROTH

I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think other writers work such long hours?

ROTH

I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out “Is he as crazy as I am?” I don’t need that question answered.

Little escaped his notice. Joseph O’Neill’s 2012 Atlantic article on the shape-shifting nature of Roth's work, has a partial catalogue:

I suppose there are people who believe that even good novels spring from an instrumental urge on the part of the writer to explore his “themes.” If that were true, the work of Philip Roth would be largely reducible to his pressing and often recurrent interest in Jews in America (and Israel and Europe); the social history of Newark; sex; marriage; illness and aging; the prostate gland; pain; persecution and disgrace; the political landscape of post-war America; masturbation; death; writing; identity and masquerade; desire; life; Nixon; racial and sexual politics; childhood; the dealings of men and women; and baseball. (Roth himself has compared his repertoire to his father’s conversation: “Family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew.”) But of course, there is no reason why such preoccupations, of neutral worth in themselves, would result in writing rather than some other activity—chatter, say. Furthermore, themes come and go. If we dropped Philip Roth on a cartoon desert island, we could expect a book featuring a solitary palm tree and the predicament of a fictional Philip Roth marooned on a desert island.

Roth himself explained it, sort of, in The Paris Review:

Nathan Zuckerman is an act. It’s all the art of impersonation, isn’t it? That’s the fundamental novelistic gift. Zuckerman is a writer who wants to be a doctor impersonating a pornographer. I am a writer writing a book impersonating a writer who wants to be a doctor impersonating a pornographer—who then, to compound the impersonation, to barb the edge, pretends he’s a well-known literary critic. Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend. The sly and cunning masquerade. Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all. His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down. You don’t necessarily, as a writer, have to abandon your biography completely to engage in an act of impersonation. It may be more intriguing when you don’t. You distort it, caricature it, parody it, you torture and subvert it, you exploit it—all to give the biography that dimension that will excite your verbal life. Millions of people do this all the time, of course, and not with the justification of making literature. They mean it. It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces. Think of the art of the adulterer: under tremendous pressure and against enormous odds, ordinary husbands and wives, who would freeze with self-consciousness up on a stage, yet in the theater of the home, alone before the audience of the betrayed spouse, they act out roles of innocence and fidelity with flawless dramatic skill. Great, great performances, conceived with genius down to the smallest particulars, impeccably meticulous naturalistic acting, and all done by rank amateurs. People beautifully pretending to be “themselves.” Make-believe can take the subtlest forms, you know. Why should a novelist, a pretender by profession, be any less deft or more reliable than a stolid, unimaginative suburban accountant cheating on his wife? Jack Benny used to pretend to be a miser, remember? Called himself by his own good name and claimed that he was stingy and mean. It excited his comic imagination to do this. He probably wasn’t all that funny as just another nice fellow writing checks to the UJA and taking his friends out to dinner. Céline pretended to be a rather indifferent, even irresponsible physician, when he seems in fact to have worked hard at his practice and to have been conscientious about his patients. But that wasn’t interesting.

Will there be any more Roth books? Will the Swedish Academy finally relent? All we can do it wait. In the meantime, Roth is peering over the shoulder of his biographer. They anticipate publication in 2022.


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