Maybe it’s been quoted once too often – maybe Claudia Roth Pierpont felt to include it in an exegesis of the master Philip Roth’s fifty-year literary career was to restate the blindingly obvious – but I was moderately surprised that there’s no room in her endlessly entertaining Roth Unbound for a timeless homily from his 1961 essay “Writing American Fiction”. Roth spends a thousand words or so retelling the story of an appalling double murder and the series of bizarre, sad, and darkly comical consequences that ensue. “And what is the moral of the story? Simply this: that the American author in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” Thrillingly, when this essay was published, Roth had published only book, a novella and a clutch of stories. Reading it now, you see it as a kind of challenge he set himself, one that his writing career over the next fifty-plus years met.
Somewhere between a biography and a long academic-ish essay, Roth Unbound calls itself a study of the life of Roth’s art and therefore of the art of his life. Intriguingly, the book was written with its subject’s full cooperation and indeed collaboration. The result then is at times a kind of three-way discussion in which Pierpont jogs the reader’s memory of, say, My Life as a Man, advances a critical assessment which may or may not tally with the reader’s own – then Roth chimes in to tell us something of the time in his life when he got the idea, or contradicts Pierpont’s occasional light criticism, or fills in one or another interesting blank. Indeed, the book slightly gazumps any standard future biography – and we already know Roth has appointed Blake Bailey, author most recently of a compendious life of John Cheever), to produce the authorised version – by getting in during the (one hopes, long) period between Roth’s “retirement” and his eventual death. Pierpont even bates us by refusing to identify some women passingly significant to Roth and referring the reader to the future biography which will no doubt name them. Simultaneously, relaying to us Roth’s own commentary, Pierpont ensures her book will remain critical to those future studies – if not to the kind of academic treatises where authorial intent is sidelined in favour of reader response.
It’s not that I think Pierpont is constructing a myth of some humorous, charming, avuncular simulacrum of Philip Roth – it’s just that others are still busy perpetuating the myth of the woman-hating, self-loathing Jew who’s done and still does irreparable harm
There’s a slight tinge of the hagiographic here at times. Well, fine: Pierpont’s a friend and one of Roth’s early readers; if he appears at first surprisingly congenial here, laughing and joking all the time, it’s worth considering how else you’d expect Pierpont to describe a good friend except as likeable. Meantime, when I Googled to try and find that precise quote about reality outdoing fiction, what came up were articles about how foolish and irresponsible we all were for forgetting Roth’s outrageous misdemeanours of the 1970s, or (from The Tablet: the curse of memory will never end) a piece on how his “narcissism” caused enduring damage to the arts in America. It’s not that I think Pierpont is constructing a myth of some humorous, charming, avuncular simulacrum of Philip Roth – it’s just that others are still busy perpetuating the myth of the woman-hating, self-loathing Jew who’s done and still does irreparable harm. It feels at times like this is a pre-emptive strike in the depressingly inevitable culture war there’ll be post-Roth when his reputation is argued over by parties determined to reduce the man and his oeuvre to polarised extremes.
In the meantime, it’s difficult to see who this book is aimed at – certainly not the newcomer. Well, it’s aimed at me, I suppose: the fan who’s read all 31 of his books (even those Pierpont notes, not in so many words, that one might profitably avoid, like The Great American Novel and that late-career lapse in taste, judgment and, it seems, authorial distance, The Humbling). I should confess some bias here: for me, American Pastoral is the greatest book of the latter half of the twentieth century (or is it the Zuckerman quartet? Oh, or –?), and Roth the titan of the whole of that century of American letters (I’d expand that still further, but there’s Melville to take into account) – though I didn’t get on with Portnoy’s Complaint on first read and it took the magisterial The Human Stain and, especially, his short novel The Dying Animal to bring me round to him, whereafter I embarked on an effort to read the whole back catalogue.
Barring a late-in-life reread of that whole canon, as Roth himself embarked on in his retirement (working backwards, though he claims he stalled at Portnoy and “didn’t read the first four books” – and indeed Pierpont’s summaries of Letting Go and When She Was Good are more entertaining than those early novels), Roth Unbound acts as a handy summary meantime, refreshing the reader’s memory of some of his most all-consuming characters, such as Mickey Sabbath, whom even Roth’s vastest, most pyrotechnic novel cannot contain; structural conceits (the teasing postscript that casts doubt on even the title of The Facts, or The Counterlife’s delightful structure that writes, rewrites and unwrites itself as you read; for someone who avowedly never wanted to write a “postmodern novel”, Roth has had a good few narrative tricks up his sleeve), and even that genuinely breathtaking moment when I realised the “trick” in Indignation, which is too good to spoil here. (Bad luck to those who encounter it for the first time in Pierpont’s summary.)
Astoundingly, the seeds of the teenage terrorist character in American Pastoral seem to be located in a conversation with John Updike
And yet, Pierpont allows us to see, for the first time, I think, the obverse of that famous quote about how real life trounces fiction. Some of the most memorable, the most absurd, the most appalling or fantastical scenes and set-pieces in Roth’s oeuvre are shown to be drawn from his own life: My Life as a Man’s atrocious female lead, who buys a vial of a homeless woman’s urine so that she can pretend to her husband she’s pregnant, then pretends to go for an abortion but in fact heads to the movies to see a double feature, is taken almost verbatim, as it were, from Roth’s first marriage; so, too, from real life comes a story he’s told about an actor who loses his ability to act, which he turns into fiction for The Humbling; even, astoundingly, the seeds of the teenage terrorist character in American Pastoral seem to be located in a conversation with John Updike. Again and again we see the real-life events of a chapter or two ago emerge, recast as fiction. Some of these are familiar – Claire Bloom has already told her side of a marriage that informed several of Roth’s more roman à clef-ish books, though even here some of the material that seems most likely to be drawn from life is shown to be pure invention – while others are eye-opening.
To an extent it’s inevitable: every writer mines his past for material; nothing is forgotten and none of his acquaintances (or their stories) is safe. But it casts that famous quotation a different light, almost underselling the power of Roth’s imagination – until, anyway, you revisit the novels, the visceral shock of those scenes, the power of the prose. Fascinating in its own right, Roth Unbound is valuable in showing us that the work and the man behind them speak with the same voice. Musing on the fact he’s never been a big drinker, Roth admits he can nonetheless “fully understand the need to ease the pain of work when it is going badly, which is most of the time”, which leads us to those famous “muscular” male American authors who were also alcoholics: Faulkner, Hemingway, Cheever. Pierpont, no doubt aware she’s being made to set him up, duly asks what Roth he turns to if not alcohol – what meets his need, and “he replies, without missing a beat: ‘The misery.’” The best of this unusual book is in exchanges like these, which could have come from any of the great man’s best novels. C