Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (review)

"Sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness," Philip Roth has said, "are my closest friends" (1). The title to Safer's opening chapter aptly alludes to this remark of Roth's and it effectively defines the boundaries of her study's focus. Following Roth's own critical example, Safer argues that comedy provides the perspective through which Roth creates his art. Her opening chapter connects Roth's comic inventiveness to a variety of likely and unlikely sources. For Safer, Roth responds not only to the so-called Jewish comedy of Sholom Alechem, Franz Kafka, and Woody Allen but also to the western literary comedic tradition from Juvenal to the Augustan satirists. Terms such as farce, satire, black comedy, and the absurd recur frequently and are used casually without being worried by excessive detailed explication. Safer does not intend to add to our critical understanding of what comedy is, or how it works, but to portray how Roth's humor limns a "bizarre cartoon world where the ludicrous and calamitous merge, a world in which black humor keeps reappearing and we do not know whether to laugh or cry" (1).

Roth has been writing comedy at least since his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, but, as the title suggests, Safer restricts her analysis to works since The Ghost Writer (excluding The Facts, Deception, and Patrimony). Although her strategy does not allow her to discuss what is arguably Roth's greatest comic masterpiece, Portnoy's Complaint, Safer's decision to limit her study to these novels makes sense for two reasons. First, Sanford Pinsker's pioneering study, The Comedy that Hoits, has addressed most of Roth's pre-Zuckerman fiction and established the critical context for any discussion of Roth's comedy. Second, the later Roth is also the "postmodern Roth" and throughout Safer probes the relationship between postmodernism and comedy.

Contrary to other theorists of the postmodern such as Linda Hutcheon or Jean Baudrillard, Safer suggests that postmodern narrative strategies are inherently comic. For Safer, Roth's comedy is best understood within the context of postmodern interrogations of identity and language. She draws on William Gass's argument "that language is not referential" but, in Gass's words, presents "the world within the world" to argue that Roth's fiction creates contingent structures of meaning always on the verge of collapsing into comedy.

Yet, as Safer acknowledges, postmodern skepticism toward stable meaning also translates into a skepticism about the coherence of the self. For Roth, this has meant, as Safer acknowledges, that the self is at best a theater of conflicting impersonations. Protagonists such as Zuckerman (in The Counterlife), Roth (Operation Shylock), and Sabbath (Sabbath's Theatre) are known through the deformation of their selves. Out of this situation Roth creates comedy, to be sure, which in turn makes readers wonder what is so funny about what they read. Mickey Sabbath, for instance, is a pariah yet his grotesque actions elicit almost unwilling sympathy from the reader in the form of laughter. The relentless deconstruction of the self that these characters enact not only effects a surprising complicity between protagonist and reader (as in Nabokov's Lolita) but also challenges the structures of meaning by which a society, or cultural group, defines itself. Zuckerman in The Counterlife or Roth in Operation Shylock ask the question "what is a Jew?" (29). Whether questioning the moral efficacy of Israel as a nation-state or doubting the authenticity of the assimilated American Jew, these comic novels question Jewish identity to its (presumed) core.

Roth's work has always centered on such questions. Safer shows that while Roth's comedy challenges what it means to be Jewish, it does not surrender the question of Jewishness altogether. Despite the postmodern comedy of the early Zuckerman novels and Operation Shylock, Safer argues that Roth in his recent works is getting more rather than less Jewish. In American Pastoral, a novel about the turbulent American 1960s, Safer...