Roth left readers feeling they had been hit by a lightning bolt
The young Philip Roth set out to shock but his later masterpieces revealed an author of profound imaginative power with a harrowing understanding of human frailty, writes David Williamson
IMAGINE if a founding member of the Rolling Stones or another icon of Sixties rock music started producing their most exciting work of their career right now.
Something similar happened with Philip Roth.
He won fame and notoriety with the taboo-breaking novels of his first decade as a writer. If the publication of DH Lawrence’s unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959 in the US and in 1960 in the UK made literary and social conservatives worry that writers had just been handed a licence to trek through the realms of the lustful and the scatological, Roth seemed on a mission to send them into fits of apoplexy.
Plenty of people have spent the bulk of their lives trading on an early reputation as an enfant terrible and when Roth hit his sixties he could have retired and spent subsequent decades giving mischief-rich interviews about the cultural shocks he triggered with the likes of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969).
But in 1997 American Pastoral arrived in bookshops and the world had proof that Roth was not just one of the cleverest wordsmiths of his generation – he could stake a claim to have just written the great American novel.
When you open this work you enter its reality and Roth makes you feel the anxiety, bewilderment and anguish which grips the central character.
It is the story of Seymour “Swede” Levov, whose life reads like a case study in the American Dream. He is celebrated for the athletic prowess he displayed in his schooldays, he is married to Miss New Jersey 1949, he has a wonderful house and he is the boss of his family’s successful glove business.
What could go wrong? Everything. His world is shattered by a literal explosion. His daughter sets off a bomb at a post office in protest at the Vietnam War. The novel is a vivid portrayal of both a family and a country in turmoil.
Roth won the Pulitzer for this masterpiece, yet this was not the climax of the writing career but the opening of a new act. Successive works dug deep into the lives of unforgettable characters while also exploring the currents trembling through his nation’s culture.
Scholars will turn to The Human Stain (2000) to study that gleaming moment of American prosperity between the end of the Cold War and before September 11 but Roth was much more than a chronicler and commentator. In 2004 he proved himself an imaginative writer of the highest order with The Plot Against America.
This follows a Jewish family in a United States in which the aviator Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 election and anti-semitism rips through the country.
Having fashioned an epic worthy of Hollywood (David Simon, the creator of The Wire, is adapting it into a mini-series), Roth then penned a quiet, short and deeply personal meditation on mortality, Everyman.
More books followed at the rate of one a year and he collected honours and acclaim, including the Man Booker International Prize in 2011, and he was made a commander in the Legion d’honneur in 2013.
Roth had one more shock for readers. He stopped writing.
In 2012 he told a French magazine: “To tell you the truth, I’m done.”
This didn’t mean he retreated from literature or New York.
The celebrated Irish writer Colm Tóibín told the story of how he sat down alone to listen to a chamber quartet in a venue below Carnegie Hall. He felt a tap on his shoulder and a voice said: “I hope you’re going to be quiet.” It was Roth.
He read prodigiously, devouring books with the same energy with which he once put words on paper. In a New York Times interview this year he name-checked works of history alongside the writings of African-American author Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bruce Springsteen’s memoir.
His passing at the age of 85 marks the closing of a chapter in English language writing. Roth was among the last survivors of a particular breed of American literature’s big beasts.
Tom Wolfe passed away on May 14; John Updike left us in 2009; Norman Mailer quit the stage in 2007; Saul Bellow died in 2005.
These strutting stags burned with the ambition of the emerging superpower in which they found fame, wealth and different degrees of notoriety. Such aspiring heirs of Hemingway were assured of their own genius and unafraid to lock horns with rivals.
Roth and Updike in particular seized the opportunity to write stories that just a few years earlier would have been targets for censorship. They sought to detail the most intimate aspects of adult relationships with the same candour that painters explored similar themes; the liberalisation in literature preceded similar developments in cinema, notably with the release of Midnight Cowboy in 1969.
Few writers enjoy the celebrity Roth and his comrades and rivals could command as national figures in post-war America. But the novel is thriving and a less macho literary environment is by no means a poorer one (and Roth has no shortage of critics concerning his portrayal of women).
Alpha male authors may have been household names thanks to their headline-making antics but it’s a mistake to think that the real giants of American literature were limited to this gang. Toni Morrison, still with us at the age of 87, gave the world a deeper understanding of black America and was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in 1993; Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) has a fighting chance of being remembered as the most important novel to emerge from that country in the 20th century.
Today writers such as Marilynne Robinson (Gilead) and Jennifer Egan (A Visit From the Goon Squad) are masters of their craft who portray complex and utterly credible characters with empathy and insight while telling stories with the power to shape how we navigate our world.
Roth at his best deserves to be remembered not as a taboo-attacking attention seeker but as a powerful contributor to this rich and diverse literary tradition which he repeatedly energised by demonstrating how a novel can grip our imagination, resonate with deepest emotions and focus our attention on truths we would otherwise miss. His late career renaissance was the reward for his unflinching commitment to this craft.
In his January New York Times interview Roth remarked: “I have many dear dead friends. A number were novelists. I miss finding their new books in the mail.”
Roth’s fans have missed the arrival of new novels in the years since his retirement. His passing will spur them to return to his classic works and remember how his finest writing took them to the Newark of his childhood and his imagination, to a college town where secrets smoulder, and into the heart of an aching father; future generations will come across the likes of American Pastoral, start reading, and feel they have been hit by lightning.