‘Philip Roth’ Review: The Masks of a Writer
Roth’s fiction drew heavily on his own life and literary reputation in ways that blurred imagination and reality.
Philip Roth liked to booby-trap his biographers. In “Exit Ghost” (2007), he calls biography “the lowest of literary rackets.” Yet one version of biography kept drawing him back. “Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life,” he once said.
In “Philip Roth: Stung by Life,” Steven J. Zipperstein springs the trap. His approach is straightforward: center the writing without pretending the life is dispensable. “There was nothing of greater importance to Roth than his books,” Mr. Zipperstein insists, “his true loves, and the only reason that justifies spending years of one’s own life writing and rewriting a book about him.”
Mr. Zipperstein begins by anchoring Roth’s art in his origins. “What is your background?” William F. Buckley Jr.’s wife, Patricia, once asked Roth. “I didn’t have one,” he replied. “We were too poor.” The poverty of Newark, N.J., in fact, served as Roth’s inexhaustible native ground. In evoking that territory and its immigrant strivers, Mr. Zipperstein writes with the passion of a reader whose life was altered by Roth. He recalls himself as a teenager, encountering Roth’s writing for the first time: His “confessional voice, explosive intelligence, and impatience with dishonesty to oneself all had the feel of a barrage of urgent letters addressed just to me.”
Roth’s honesty with himself acts like a solvent. It removes the epidermis and leaves the nerves exposed. The result is astonishing. Thirty-one books across half a century: the decorous debut of “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959); Alexander Portnoy’s acrobatics with apple, glove, bottle, brassiere and a slab of liver in “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1969); the Kafkaesque metamorphosis in “The Breast” (1972); the filial exasperation of “Patrimony” (1991); the high-tragic architecture of the American trilogy (“American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain” in 1997, 1998 and 2000); the counterfactual audacity of “The Plot Against America” (2004); and the late-life stoic parables such as “Everyman” (2006) and “Nemesis” (2010). Few American novelists have ventured across so many registers of comedy and calamity.
Mr. Zipperstein is acute about the discipline that made such prolific range possible. Like his fictional stand-in Nathan Zuckerman, who called himself an “unchaste monk,” Roth lived that paradox: monastic at his desk but promiscuous in the freedoms he demanded from every other human arrangement. This was his way of protecting the imagination, of keeping it “on call,” as he once said of his sparse routine in his home in Litchfield County, Conn.: “I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room. And I’m the emergency.”
Mr. Zipperstein portrays Roth as “willing to challenge himself on all fronts, to lay bare all his limits as a writer, son, and Jew.” But the biographer also makes clear that Roth cultivated reticence with the same zeal with which he flaunted candor. “Few contemporary writers have shown themselves to be quite as self-referential as Roth,” Mr. Zipperstein writes, “and few self-referential writers have managed, for so very long, to be quite so cagey.” That play of masks—at once disclosing and disguising—animated Roth’s fictional alter egos, incarnations both intimate and inscrutable.
The Jewish question, inevitably, looms large. Roth was reviled for turning Jewish mothers into suffocating grotesques and Jewish sons—“boiling with temptations,” as he put it in “The Anatomy Lesson” (1983)—into ingrates. He was resented for puncturing euphemisms of communal self-regard. For this he was called a self-hater, a shande, or hopelessly obsolete. “It may be,” the author Cynthia Ozick told an interviewer this year, “that Philip Roth especially is likely to leave little or nothing heritable, since he was the product and the purveyor of a sociological outlook; and his sociology is dead.”
But if Roth’s interest in Judaism was intermittent, his engagement with Jewishness—as temperament and as argument—was lifelong. He grappled with Israel’s dilemmas in “The Counterlife” (1986) and “Operation Shylock” (1993) and wrestled with antisemitism in “The Plot Against America,” his novel about an attempted fascist takeover of the U.S. in the 1940s. Roth, in Mr. Zipperstein’s telling, probed Jewish life—and its collision with American ambition—with more fidelity than any rabbinic sermon could offer.
What distinguishes Mr. Zipperstein’s volume—composed with the tact of a historian who has read the archives and the novels with equal care—is how deliberately it resists the temptations that have undone earlier efforts. Previous accounts of Roth, including the one found in a memoir by Claire Bloom, Roth’s ex-wife, have chased the tours d’amour. Mr. Zipperstein suggests that the real drama was not in the bedroom but at the writing desk, where Roth’s quarrels with himself became art. Mr. Zipperstein faults Blake Bailey’s nearly 900-page authorized biography as “curiously tone-deaf to the writing at the epicenter of Roth’s life” and proceeds to tune our ears back to that center.
Mr. Zipperstein records the accusations that clung to Roth—misogyny most of all. But he allows countervailing testimony both from the work itself, which housed women as figures of power and empathy; and from the life, which included unadvertised acts of generosity to friends in trouble (among them the novelist Janet Hobhouse, whom he quietly aided during her final illness, and the Romanian-born writer Norman Manea).
The point isn’t exoneration; it’s proportion. Mr. Zipperstein also restores to view the curatorial Roth and his public literary citizenship. During the course of roughly a decade, Roth curated Penguin’s “Writers From the Other Europe,” smuggling masters from behind the Iron Curtain into American sight: Tadeusz Borowski, Danilo Kiš, Milan Kundera and, crucially, Bruno Schulz. Above all, Mr. Zipperstein returns us from the grievance ledger to the pages where Roth fought his real fights, his struggles with syntax and structure.
The life mattered, yes—its appetites, its feuds, its Newark-ness. But Mr. Zipperstein builds a biography that shuttles us back to the fiction, heritable or not, where the man hid in plain sight. Roth championed writers such as Schulz so they wouldn’t be lost to American readers; this biography returns the favor, rescuing Roth from the noise and restoring him to the exuberant sentences he spent his life turning around.
If literary biography is a racket, this is the honorable version: one that knows when to let the sentences speak.