Philip Roth: A Heart with Dichotomies

Mark Shechner, Up Society's Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. xii + 255 pp. $50.00; $22.95 paper.

Debra Shostak, Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. xii + 332 pp. $39.95.

In I Married a Communist, Philip Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, explains Roth's intense interest in subjectivity, suggests its narrative form, and offers a mini-discourse on the writing life: "Occasionally now, looking back, I think of my life as one long speech that I've been listening to. . . . I have been hearing it as long as I can remember. . . . But whatever the reason, the book of my life is a book of voices. When I ask myself how I arrived at where I am, the answer surprises me: 'Listening.'"¹ What Roth claims for his own life characterizes his critics as well: vying with each other by assailing the novelist's narratives or by acclaiming them, these critics amount to a constellation of cacophonous voices which at once applaud the writer's work and dispute its value. Voices raised against Philip Roth include those of certain feminists who declare the writer insensitive to gender issues, blind to what women are, or guilty of depicting them cruelly. Critics of both genders have protested what they deem Roth's obsessive fascination with himself, a preoccupation, they claim, which precludes attention to much else. Nonetheless, Philip Roth continues to capture his readers' attention. Criticism of the writer's work is rife, conflicted, and often revealing, not only of Roth, as two recent books, Up Society's Ass, Copper and Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives, confirm.

Mark Shechner and Debra Shostak present startlingly different perspectives vis-à-vis Philip Roth as well as antithetical convictions about the act of reading itself. That activity is undertaken in very distinct ways in our age, which assumes a literary terrain far different from the one inhabited by nineteenth-century critics: for those readers, expressing appreciation of a writer's narratives or disapproval of them was sufficient. Contemporary theorists who believe that readers' reactions to texts complete their interpretations are wholly unlike their predecessors. Mark Shechner's statement, "[i]f I were writing this for tenure I might well trace the 'motif' through Roth's career and put the whole anal megillah up in lights. But nobody is looking over my shoulder and nothing obliges me to adopt and defend a point of view and to keep everything that is surprising and mercurial about Roth at arm's length," instances the kind of response Philip Roth can provoke (223). Roth has obviously incited Shechner's defiance and influenced his style, as the essays in his book make plain. Early in the introduction to Up Society's Ass, Copper, Shechner reflects on the short reviews that constitute the basis of his book along with the additional remarks he has added titled "Second Thoughts," suggesting, more or less, the results of rereading, his final assessments. Of Philip Roth's talents, Shechner writes: "[T]hey [Shechner's short reviews] do remind me of Roth's unending ability to get a rise out of me after all these years, which is why I've continued to write about him. I respond, and I don't ask of literature much more than this: to be provocative, to engage me, to make me want more. How rarely does that take place!" (5). Unlike Shechner, reader-response theorists resist including the kind of personal history he finds so rewarding.

To that history Shechner adds his admission that he was a Freudian in his Berkeley days because "radical thought" was the magnet and "psychoanalysis was the available radicalism" (7). The attraction was short-lived, for Shechner discovered that "the contents of the Freudian unconscious were 'few, simple, and boring'" (8). Up Society's Ass rehearses that opinion throughout its pages. Unsurprisingly, Shechner's sense of the...