Roth on Roth

“It is not true that every writer isthe teller of one tale,” writes Adam Kirsch in his TNR review of Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books , “but it is close to being true of Roth. Again and again he stages the rebellion of desire against duty: sexual desire, most famously in the Kepesh novels and in Portnoy’s Complaint , but equally, in the Zuckerman novels,thedesire for glory and artistic achievement.”

That’s a hard shtick to keep up when the culture is steadily shedding sexual constraints. Kirsch suggests that, “To give his plots danger and moral weight, to make them feel like more than just stories of bored middle-class people pairing offto avoid being John Updike, whose rivalry and touchy friendship with Roth is discussed in Roth Unbound Roth has resorted to several strategies.”

Roth doesn’t follow the sexual mysticism of some other American writers. Instead, sex becomes the life force.

“Henry Zuckerman, the dentist brother of Nathan in The Counterlife , is forced to choose literally between his sex life and his life, when he must decide whether to risk a heart operation that would restore his potency.” He decides to have the operation, and Kirsch draws the conclusion: “If sex is worth dying for, Roth implies, it must be worth destroying ones marriage and ones family for; sex mustbe worth everything. This elevation of sex to the summumbonum is one of the most dubious elements in Roths work. Perhaps what makes it so resistible is that, unlike most writers deeply devoted to sex, Roth does not try to make it a symbol of a broader liberation; he is immune to any Lawrence- orMailer-like mysticism of the orgasm. Sex, for him, is never far removed from just getting laid.”

Despite the “puritanical” of liberation in Roth’s later work, Kirsch doesn’t think Roth has changed his mind about sex: “he was acknowledging that sex, in order to carry moral and fictional weight, must be a force of opposition: to the father, to social order, to death itself. The ban makes the transgression possible. But the ban on sex had already faded in the culture for which he wrote.”

Kirsch thinks that, despite his various demurrals and evasions, Roth is finally writing about himself. “what writer is more obviously the product of his character, more self-similar in his obsessions, than Philip Roth? The young Roth, the well-loved child of a protective Jewish family, writes Goodbye, Columbus , throwing a bomb at Jewish pieties. The Jewish establishment is outraged, so he writes Portnoys Complaint , which is even more offensive to Jews. Then he creates Nathan Zuckerman, who is the author of Carnovsky , a book that outraged the Jewish establishment, and punishes Zuckerman with all the remorse and estrangement from family that in real lifeas Pierpont showsRoth himself never suffered.”

In sum, “The questions we ask in reading RothWhat drives a man to write so furiously about Jews, about women, about death and sex and America? What inner experience and conflict is he forever symbolizing in his books?are mostly about Roth himself.Heis the true protagonistof his books.”