My Philip Roth anecdote
Author Philip Roth died last Tuesday. You can read hundreds of tributes to him and many criticisms of him, and I don’t have too much to add to that except to say that I liked his early works (including two that almost no one seems to care much for, Letting Go and When She Was Good) but I stopped reading him long, long ago because his works ceased to interest me, for whatever reason.
But in reading about him the other day I came across this interview of Roth by NPR’s Terry Gross, and it reminded me of something. Here’s the quote, which describes how he prepared his parents for the furor that would undoubtedly ensue when Portnoy’s Complaint came out:
Well, my mother and father were pretty good. I have to tell you, I had to prepare them. I felt I had to prepare them for the publication of this book. That was not something I had done with the previous three books. But before “Portnoy’s Complaint,” I did have to prepare them, I thought, because it became clear as publication came upon us that it was going to be a big book. I didn’t know that for a while, but then I knew it from my publisher, Random House. And I wrote books that they were publishing and so on.
And so I was living in New York City at the time, and I invited them over to have lunch with me. I invited my mother and father to come over from Elizabeth, N.J., where they lived to have lunch with me. And it wasn’t the first time they had come over and had lunch, but this was special. I said I wanted to talk to them about something. And we had lunch. And I said, look, this book is going to come out, and it appears as though it’s going to cause a sensation because it has the following ingredients in it. And I told them what they were. And I said, and you are going to be telephoned by journalists, and you have no experience with that. And I want to prepare you for it.
No. 1 is you don’t have to talk to anybody. You can politely hang up or unpolitely (ph) hang up. They’re just journalists, you know. And they’ll be very nice to you. And they’ll say flattering things to you. And they’ll say they know your – their aunt knows your brother who knows their cousin, try to get you to talk but you don’t have to. I said, if you want to talk, that’s fine with me, too. But I want you to know you don’t have to and that you won’t give offense to anyone if you don’t. And you may be well-advised not to, but it’s finally up to you.
He says his mother reacted by worrying that he’d become too grandiose, thinking the book would be a sensation, and that he’d be bound to be disappointed.
Well, he wasn’t disappointed; it certainly was a sensation.
But I have a personal anecdote that dovetails with that one—I can corroborate Roth’s story. You see, shortly after Portnoy was published, to great acclaim and controversy, my parents went on a cruise and became friendly with—of all people—Roth’s parents. When my parents returned, they reported on some conversations they’d had, in which the Roths mentioned how Philip had prepared them for the furor and onslaught from the press, and how to deal with the notion many people would have that they were like the parents in the book.
My parents said that Roths’ parents were nothing like the parents in the book. They were perfectly fine.
What’s more, my mother added, she observed that when the Roths were approached by people saying how proud they must be of their son the writer, they answered that they had two sons and were very proud of both of them.
Roth left that out of his tale (maybe he wasn’t even aware of it), but I’m here to report it.
RIP, Philip Roth. And your parents. And mine.
That is quite the story about Philip Roth’s parents. Good to see that his recollection of how he prepared his parents dovetails with what his parents told your parents. That tells me that Philip Roth was more of a straight shooter than he was a bullshitter.
I started Portnoy’s Complaint, but don’t believe I ever finished it. (Discomfort over having my habits so explicitly described? 🙂 ) Nor did I ever read another Philip Roth book. My goal is to read at least Goodbye Columbus and American Pastoral in the next 6 months.
When I was visiting back home several days ago, the family friend I was staying with pointed out a book by a locally based author. The author told her he put in a character that was in part based on her. (Just a short mention.) In one of his previous books he had some surnames that I had known only from my hometown. Such as the state trooper with the same surname as the state trooper that was the father of someone I knew from my childhood. To top it off, that trooper I knew was based several years in the author’s hometown. I need to write the author to check that out.
I tried to read Roth a bunch of times but could never get very far, even with “Portnoy.” I did manage to listen to the audiobook for “The Plot Against America” because I find alternate history interesting and I read it as a barometer on the liberal intelligentsia’s response to George W. Bush — the evergreen belief America is going fascist.
Roth is a major American author. There’s a longstanding perception he was due a Nobel Prize for several classic novels, but probably didn’t get it in more recent years because he was Jewish.
I was pleased WaPo’s obit led with the Nobel:
It’s just as well there will be no Nobel Prize in literature this year. Philip Roth is dead.
The Nobel judges passed over America’s most formidable novelist for decades even as he published one classic after another, from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “The Plot Against America.” As thundering obituaries have noted around the world, Roth won every other honor a writer could win, sometimes – in the case of the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award – two or three times.
Roth’s “Plot Against America” described a world in which FDR was defeated in the 1940 election by Charles Lindbergh who signs pacts with Germany and Japan not to intervene in WW2 and steers the US into serious antisemitism.
Which reminded me of the classic Tom Wolfe quote:
The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
Needless to say, Tom Wolfe was never even considered as a serious Nobel Prize candidate.
Tried Roth with Portnoy’s but it was a no-go.
An important test for me is — Can I reread a work of fiction and/or do I have any desire to do so? If I do reread, is there new wisdom revealed?
This is where the novels of Roth let me down. I never want to reread anything by him. In fact, doing so would be an unwelcome chore.
Neo, many point to Roth’s late works as his best, and certainly I found “American Pastoral” to be very good, quite a surprise. Do I want to ever look at it again? No.
Contrariwise, I can reread many of Saul Bellow’s novels with both pleasure and anticipated intellectual gain. Even though he was sometimes pretentious, his work generally holds up.
Needless to say, perhaps, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Proust (and others) are different and worthwhile and fresh every time.
The Nobel has never been an award that means much. It’s always been political. My God, they passed it out to Elfriede Jelinek and Claude Simon.
I agree w/ miklos (above). I believe that the only one of Roth’s books I read was When She Was Good. (WSWG)
There are some authors I read that make me want to read more of their works. WSWG had the opposite effect on me. Much like Pat Conroy’s The Lords of Discipline.
yara:
I may be the only person on earth who really liked WSWG, and felt a lot of sympathy for Lucy. I was surprised to find that just about everyone else thought she was a loathsome character. I read it long long ago, and don’t know how I’d feel about it today, but that’s what I thought then. Plus, I very distinctly remember the part where she gets pregnant and searches desperately for a solution, and no one helps her. That seemed extremely sympathetic to me–her loneliness and isolation at such a young age.
There is a fairly recent documentary on Philip Roth available on Amazon Prime — mostly it’s just Roth on-camera, talking about his career, and thus he’s portrayed sympathetically and presents himself well.
Desparingly, I figured when Godot arrived, I could go home. Krapp’s Last Tape was all about a stupid reel-to-reel tape recorder. Zoo story was about two losers, one of whom stabbed the other while trying to top each others’ stories of being hosed. Lesson was the buttoned-up guy was a loser for…..wearing a tie or something.
Algren’s “Boots” was about a bunch of people doing stupid, self-destructive stuff which was important to them but its relevance to me was not clear.
The kid in Catcher in The Rye ended up in a rubber room and when I was told it was a typical coming of age story…. Nobody I knew.
Point is, modern lit and I don’t fit very well at all. That’s fine. We leave each other alone. What bugs me is the people who tell me there’s something wrong with me.
“It’s about the human condition”.
I have one of those, and I’m not getting much good advice reading about some guy who hits all the swimming pools in his neighborhood without being attacked by a dog or shot by cops.
And you can find genuinely sympathetic characters in the daily news. Real ones.
I agree with Aubrey. Modern fiction is either degrading or purely motive-driven, like Stephen King’s. His net worth is $400 million. Rowling’s (Harry Potter, etc,) net worth is over 600 million, pounds or dollars, whatever.
There’s lots of good modern fiction around, both by American authors and in translation.
Viet Thanh Nguyen-The Sympathizer
Denis Johnson-Tree of Smoke
If you want books reified by Pulitzers and so on.
Jennifer Egan-A Visit from the Goon Squad
is another.
neo-neocon:
I may be the only person on earth who really liked WSWG …
I should’ve said more. On both WSWG and Lords of Discipline, I left knowing that I had read a very good book by an incredibly good writer. But the outcome, even though fictional, was just devastating. Maybe I identify too closely w/the characters in the books I read…