"The critic Irving Howe cracked that the “cruelest thing anyone can do with ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ is to read it twice.” Howe had it all wrong. Roth turned self-obsession into art. Over time, he took on vast themes—love, lust, loneliness, marriage, masculinity, ambition, community, solitude, loyalty, betrayal, patriotism, rebellion, piety, disgrace, the body, the imagination, American history, mortality, the relentless mistakes of life—and he did so in a variety of forms: comedy, parody, romance, conventional narrative, postmodernism, autofiction. In each performance of a self, Roth captured a distinct sound and consciousness. The tonal and stylistic road travelled from Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus” to his “Sabbath’s Theater” is as long as that from Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” to his “Interstellar Space.” There are books among Roth’s thirty-one that I have no plans to revisit—“Letting Go,” “Deception,” “The Humbling”—but in nearly fifty years of reading him I’ve never been bored." (David Remnick in the New Yorker).
His desire for revenge and changing the public perception of him is probably why Deception is bad, the New Republic review suggests.
"For Roth, outrage was part of art. He would hold back neither the pure nor the perverse. His decision, just twenty years after the Holocaust, to portray Jews in all their human variety, without sanctimony or hesitation, proved gravely offensive to many."
Without quoting the whole article, which I'm tempted to do, I'll just quote a few snippets.
I've read most of his novels. I missed Letting Go, The Breast, Our Gang, The Great American Novel, My Life As A Man. I somehow didn't finish The Plot Against America. So I've read 25/31
I want to reread Sabbath Theater, I Married A Communist, American Pastoral, The Human Stain and The Counterlife. I actually want to read Portnoy's Complaint again, but I can't find my copy.
More quotes from the amazing review:
"The costs of radical freedom—the challenge of grappling openly, outrageously, with even the ugliest impulses of life—became a subject of his work."
"He publicly praised, among others, Nell Irvin Painter, Sean Wilentz, Louise Erdrich, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nicole Krauss, Zadie Smith, and Teju Cole."
"We learn of Roth’s generosity; of his remarkable service in getting Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš, Bruno Schulz, and other Eastern European writers published in English."
Roth has a #metoo moment, "Roth made a sexual overture to Felicity, which she rebuffed; the next morning, he left her an irate note accusing her of “sexual hysteria.” When Bloom wrote about the incident in her memoir, Roth answered in his unpublished “Notes” with a sense of affront rather than penitence: “This is what people are. This is what people do. . . . Hate me for what I am, not for what I’m not.”" This is what the Guardian review focuses on, quoting Roth, “What’s the point of having a pretty girl in the house if you don’t fuck her”
From the Guardian: Asked for his thoughts on the Nobel prize for literature going to Bob Dylan rather than to him, he joked: “It’s OK, but next year I hope Peter, Paul and Mary get it.”
More from Guardian article: When Lisa Halliday’s portrait of him as the elderly Ezra Blazer appeared in her novel Asymmetry shortly before his death, he approved.
Back to Remnick: Some Jewish people felt betrayed, misrepresented: "Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of Jewish history and mysticism, wrote. “I daresay that with the next turn of history, which will not be long delayed, this book will make all of us defendants at court.” Such chastisement did not discourage Roth from finding literary sustenance in sin. His work was not about rectitude or virtue. He looked away from nothing, least of all in himself."
"“Sabbath’s Theater,” the protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, is told by his wife, “You’re as sick as your secrets.” It doesn’t sit well with him: It was not for the first time that he was hearing this pointless, shallow, idiotic maxim. “Wrong,” he told her. . . . “You’re as adventurous as your secrets, as abhorrent as your secrets, as lonely as your secrets, as alluring as your secrets, as courageous as your secrets, as vacuous as your secrets, as lost as your secrets.”"
Roth's funeral: "On Memorial Day, 2018, I watched as Roth was buried in a small graveyard on the campus of Bard College, in upstate New York. Roth, who thought of religion as fairy tales and illusion, left strict instructions: no Kaddish, no God, no speeches. Roth had asked a range of friends to read passages from his novels. The mourners heard only the language of Roth and then shovelled dirt into his grave until it was full."
The upshot of the Remnick book review: "The man who emerges is a literary genius, constantly getting it wrong, loving others, then hurting them, wrestling with himself and with language, devoted to an almost unfathomable degree to the art of fiction. Roth is never as alive, as funny, as complicated, as enraging, or as intelligent as he is in the books of his own devising. But here we know him better, even if the biographical form cannot quite contain this author’s life and works. Roth, a constant reader of Henry James, would take no issue with the opening line of James’s story “Louisa Pallant”: “Never say you know the last words about any human heart!”"
The upshot of the Guardian review: "“Why do you want to characterise me … as some sort of heartless rapist manqué?” the Roth character Tarnopol scolds his psychiatrist Dr Spielvogel in My Life As a Man. Some critics will use this biography to do just that. But the story is more complex – and a lot more interesting."
Philip Roth 1933 – 2018
Other Reviews:
Laura Marsh in New Republic "Is this biography as revenge? It may be the longed-for rebuttal. " and "In Bailey’s telling, Roth’s life is a story of a great talent, threatened by other people’s desires and demands."
And, "From book to book, Bailey expresses Roth’s disappointment at uncomprehending reviewers and prize juries—where’s that National Book Award? And how about that Pulitzer?"
And, "“I was forty and she was nineteen. Perfect. As God meant it to be”). His analyst observes that “a mature woman wouldn’t take your shit,” "
And, "The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, do not really fit into the sweep of the narrative, not least because the best writing in them has nothing to do with sex.
And he had notes to himself, “DO NOT JUDGE IT. DO NOT TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT. DO NOT CENSOR IT,” he advised himself in an all-caps memo. His desk later bore notes to self that read “Stay Put” and “No optional striving.”
Here is his routine when he lived with Claire Bloom in London: "he would start the day with a three-mile walk to work through Hyde Park, work at his studio till 1:30 p.m., stop for lunch at a French restaurant, and then work until six or seven o’clock at night, and walk home."
And, "A criticism that long rankled for Roth was Morris Dickstein’s observation that he couldn’t imagine women with complexity. His female characters were either “bitchy castrating women” or “doting sexual slaves.” Hermione Lee later identified four categories: “overprotective mothers,” “monstrously unmanning wives,” “consoling, tender, sensible girlfriends,” and “recklessly libidinous sexual objects.” Roth once defended himself against charges of misogyny by protesting that actually many of his most important professional relationships were with women: his lawyer, some editors, his first agent Candida Donadio, and his favorite teacher at Bucknell. To this group one might add ex-girlfriend Julia Golier, who is now co-executor of Roth’s estate, and Lisa Halliday, who dated Roth when she was in her twenties and he was in his sixties, and later wrote a flattering fictionalized account of a similar relationship in her novel Asymmetry."
And, "Possibly the worst thing you could do for Roth’s reputation would be to defend him on his own terms. His emphasis on settling scores with ex-wives and lovers draws attention to his signal failures of imagination—his lack of interest in the inner lives of women, his limited ability to reconcile his own experiences of pain with the co-existence of others’ suffering."
Roth wrote in the New Yorker to correct his Wikipedia entry.
Live by the nothing off limits sword, you die by it. "In 2011, Roth took exception to an essay by Ira Nadel in The Critical Companion to Philip Roth that drew on Claire Bloom’s book. He spent over $60,000 in legal fees to get the offending passage changed."
Final verdict: "In Bailey, Roth found a biographer who is exceptionally attuned to his grievances and rarely challenges his moral accounting. Yet the result is not a final winning of the argument, as Roth might have hoped. Just as his unpublished rebuttal to Claire Bloom made him sound like a bully, this sympathetic biography makes him a spiteful obsessive. The absence of ironies here, the raw insistence on truth over untruth, are distinctly un-Rothian. They strain oddly against Roth’s own experiments with persona—the play of author and alter ego, of life and counterlife, in endless permutations of self-exploration. If he thought self-justification would be simpler, he should have known better."
Links
Man I hope I'm reviewing books at 92: Cynthia Ozick review in NY Times
Links after Bailey's personal life came out and his published stopped publishing the book:
Comments
Post a Comment