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This is a study of the contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading alongside a number of his contemporaries and focusing particularly on his later fiction, it offers a view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer who constantly reinvents himself in surprising ways. At the heart of this book are a number of readings of Roth's works both in terms of their relationships with each other and with fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O'Brien, Bret Easton Ellis, Stanley Elkin, Howard Jacobson and Jonathan Safran Foer. The book identifies as a thread running through all of Roth's work the use of paradox, both as a rhetorical device and as an organising intellectual and ideological principle.
1 Introduction For so long an enfant terrible of the American literary world, Philip Roth may now be considered one of its elder statesmen. He has published eighteen full-length works of fiction in an oeuvre that spans high seriousness (Letting Go (1962)) and low humour (The Great American Novel (1973)), expansive monologue (Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)) and elliptical dialogue (Deception (1990)), spare realism (When She Was Good (1967)) and grotesque surrealism (The Breast (1972)). In addition to the novels for which he is most renowned, Roth has also published
mimetically an objective, external reality; at worst, a tool deployed by ideological state apparatuses (schools, colleges, the media) to reinforce the political status quo, promoting an idea of normative values that underpins the Capitalist system. In the last decade of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first, attempts have been made to bridge this chasm: Robert Siegle posits the 48 Philip Roth existence of a ‘two way corridor’ or ‘permeable membrane’ in contemporary American fiction, implying reciprocal exchange and fluid movement, rather than fixed
, real and imagined, are ubiquitous in the work of Philip Roth. From Peter Tarnopol’s lengthy divorce litigation in My Life as a Man and the fantastical indictment of Alexander Portnoy at the end of Portnoy’s Complaint, to Mickey Sabbath’s arraignment on charges of obscenity in Sabbath’s Theater, to the historical court case of John Demjanjuk that dominates the opening of Operation Shylock, the trial is one of Roth’s favourite tropes. Frequently employing a confessional mode in his fiction, Roth noted early in his career that ‘the question of who or what shall have
’s utopia of let’s pretend, the Jew’s utopia of not being Jewish, to name only the grandest of her projects to deodorize life and make it palatable.’ (Roth 1998: 179) The musicians had laid bare the youngest, most innocent of our ideas of life, the indestructible yearning for the way things aren’t and can never be. (Roth 2000: 207) Philip Roth’s fiction has always been characterised by the tension between the individual capacity for self-determination and the deterministic forces of history; between seductive dreams of harmony, idealism and purity and the troubling
in 1973 (reprinted in Reading Myself and Others), Philip Roth recalls how he came upon a letter from Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which Melville describes his elation upon completing Moby Dick: ‘I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb’ (Melville quoted in Roth 2001a: 76). Roth ‘pinned it up along with the other inspirational matter on [his] bulletin board’, while at the same time acknowledging to himself that ‘no matter how hard [he] tried, he could never really hope to be wicked’ (76). This tension – between the desire to be morally
opportunistic exploitation, of human suffering.6 While there may have been a degree of self-pity and self-dramatisation in Foer’s observation in an interview that he had become ‘the most hated writer in America’ (quoted in McInerney 2005: 6), some of the reviews of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close smacked somewhat of schadenfreude, their 188 Philip Roth authors apparently relishing the opportunity of putting this young upstart firmly in his place. Even those who were broadly sympathetic tended to qualify their praise with the recommendation that Foer exercise greater
that had lived and died before 220 Philip Roth us’ (51). It is precisely because death is final and absolute, the novel implies, that it is so shocking. For all the obvious differences of form and sensibility, however, the two Everymans share certain structures. For example, the medieval Everyman’s anguished exclamation when he realises that his time on earth is up – ‘O Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind’ (described by Roth in interviews as ‘the first great line in English drama’) – is echoed in the description of his modern counterpart’s state of
This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.
This book explores how the contemporary American novel has revived a long literary and political tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. In the last decades of the twentieth century, not only novelists but philosophers, critical theorists, and sociologists rediscovered the concept of friendship as a means of scrutinising bonds of national identity. This book reveals how friendship, long exiled from serious political philosophy, returned as a crucial term in late twentieth-century communitarian debates about citizenship, while, at the same time, becoming integral to continental philosophy’s exploration of the roots of democracy, and, in a different guise, to histories of sexuality. Moving innovatively between these disciplines, this important study brings into dialogue the work of authors rarely discussed together – including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole – and advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the contemporary American novel.