By Leah Hager Cohen
New York Times: October 8, 2010
By Philip Roth
280 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.US$26.
I wrote Roth off. Back in my early 20s, in a fit of literary conscientiousness, I undertook to sample his work. At the point when my nose could wrinkle no further in distaste, I was struck by a relieving epiphany — “Oh: these are for boys” — upon which I resumed my reading life unburdened by any expectation of venturing deeper into Rothiana.
Until the Book Review offered me this assignment. So unlikely, so ill-conceived a pairing, I thought it must be an error. Yet no sooner had I restored my jaw to its rightful position than I found myself accepting, and an instant later my office was empty save for a few speed lines, as in a comic strip: I’d high-tailed it to the library in order to begin remediating my embarrassing literary gap, a cause to which I devoted — with a kind of mounting, marveling pleasure — much of this past summer.
All of which is to say: Before you stands a convert. I come to swallow the leek.
But first there is the matter of the cause of my early repulsion, relevant because surely not unique. The trouble for me with Philip Roth’s fiction wasn’t so much the sex thing, or even the sexism thing (although, perhaps especially in the case of a young female reader, one might reasonably expect a barrier to enjoyment to rise from the surfeit of all those women-as-orifices, women-as-booby-traps, women-as-willing-stand-ins for whatever his protagonists are so driven to shtup). The trouble was what seemed to be the curdling vein of hostility and nihilism in the prose. Why, I wondered, if the guy’s so anti-everything, does he keep bothering to write?
From the vantage point of two decades and thousands of pages of Roth later, I don’t think it’s a bad question. My mistake was asking it rhetorically. If treated as a point of real inquiry, the question affords an opening, a way of reading and being reached by the work. For a writer so generously endowed in the irony department, Roth turns out to be astonishingly earnest. We see this in his excesses — not merely the prolificacy of his output, but the outrageousness of his characters’ offenses, their deeds, appetites, shames and confessions. Steaming along on the twin engines of intellect and humor (and what engines — horsepower through the roof), the novels transport us or run us over or both. His characters sometimes get caught up in a kind of Socratic Möbius strip, endlessly debating one another and themselves in a way that can verge on the tedious, but even then one cannot but marvel at his sheer energy, his unremitting investment in — what? Provocation. Interrogation. The feat of living. This is not a nihilist. This is a writer whose creative work lays bare the act of struggle.
Cohen's full piece at NYT.http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/books/review/Cohen-t.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1
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