In a new book, Claudia Roth Pierpont looks back on the American novelist's his life and writing. Was he a Mossad agent? Is he a misogynist? Either way, his critics have never got him down
The riddles of Philip Roth: Was he a misogynist? Was he a Mossad agent? Photo: Wesley Merritt (with thanks to Edward Hopper)
One of Philip Roth’s authorial strategies, he once said, involved fixing in his mind’s eye, as he wrote, the kind of “anti-Roth reader” who most intensely disliked his work. “I think, 'How he is going to hate this!’ ” Roth suggested with glee. “That can be just the encouragement I need.”
Even at moments of his greatest success, these anti-Roth readers have never been hard to find. Claudia Roth Pierpont’s sane and impartial study begins with the thunderous protest of the very first: the outraged rabbi who demanded to know: “What is being done to silence this man?” after the 26-year-old Roth’s first story appeared in 1959. The answer, it seems, was not much, since the accompanying collection won a National Book Award. A decade on, when the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint had made its author such a celebrity that he could barely leave the house, the august Israeli critic Gershom Scholem could still be found writing in Haaretz that this was the book “for which all anti-Semites have been praying”.
For Roth, who has always claimed that “if I’m not an American, I’m nothing”, these attacks were bewildering: what he was writing about, he said, was nothing more than a part of the country’s experience. “Deliberately keeping Jews out of the imagination of Gentiles,” he wrote, “for fear of the bigots and their stereotyping minds, is really to invite the invention of stereotypical ideas.”
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Roth Unbound by Claudia Roth Pierpont
368pp, Cape,
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Roth Unbound by Claudia Roth Pierpont
368pp, Cape,
