Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (review)

In recent years, there have been a number of very worthy book-length studies of Philip Roth, including Elaine Safer's Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (2006), Debra Shostak's Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives (2004), and Mark Shechner's Up Society's Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth (2003). Comprehensive volumes of essays addressing Roth's entire oeuvre have also lately appeared: Tim Parrish's The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (2007) and Derek Parker Royal's Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (2005). In the light of this prolific scholarship (much of it exemplary), it is important to state at the outset that Ross Posnock's study may be the most intellectually complex as well as fiercely independent study of Roth's career to date.

At its very best, Posnock's intellectually and imaginatively resonant study of "the art of immaturity" can seem both astonishing and somehow absolutely right. Filled with deft observations, this critical study offers authoritative readings of literature and society which have profound implications that exceed considerations of Roth, its ostensible solitary subject. A staunch Americanist, Posnock's previous works include books on Henry and William James as well as important essays on Ralph Ellison and other African American writers. But here he exhibits a breathtaking ease with an eclectic range of figures (the Frankfurt school, numerous East European writers) that enables him to firmly situate Roth in the cosmopolitan tradition in ways that will likely have a lasting influence on Roth scholarship.

In essence, Posnock explains in an elegant formulation that "immaturity" serves the artist as "a vehicle for the exploration of moral fantasy" (38). In the context of Roth's novels, he sees this paradigm expressed through variations on the following: "Freedom from being the good boy, freedom to discover and sublimate in art the anarchic and unsocialized parts of the self—all this requires an undoing of 'maturity,' a wounding of the responsible adult self . . . This process of letting go or undoing defenses defines Roth's creative economy" (38). Posnock is wonderfully attuned to the fact that, especially in Eastern Europe, a milieu that has had a powerful impact on Roth's skeptical imagination, creative immaturity also has profound political stakes, expressing its perverse resistance to totalitarian culture through "love of agonistic combat and rude truth" (9). It staunchly refuses "utopian thinking" and the illusions of "pastoral and idylls" in all their regressive forms.

Posnock's introductory chapter begins brilliantly, casting us immediately into the soaring cadences of one of Roth's characters' uninhibited litanies of outrage, as if to establish his sheer pleasure in the novelist's verbal exuberance. Like most Roth critics of late, Posnock is suitably impressed by the fact that, unlike the oeuvres of so many major novelists whose late works lack the ambition and energy of their best days, Roth's most powerful works have emerged in his later years: "This is unprecedented . . . Roth is now beginning to deserve comparison with what is usually regarded as the summit of late turns of novelistic genius—Henry James's major phase at the start of the century" (5–6). In this chapter, Posnock takes immaturity very seriously indeed, cogently tracing its surprising and subversive cultural permutations from the Renaissance through early modernism up until the contemporary novel. At the same time, sensitive to the fact that the privileges of "immaturity" have considerable gender implications (since it is generally allied with a masculinist avant-garde temperament), the author zealously defends Roth against enduring charges of misogyny, pointing out the "depth of characterization" apparent in a wide range of important female protagonists, including Lucy Nelson of the underrated early novel When She Was Good, Michelle Cowan in Sabbath's Theater, and the poignant figure of Faunia Farley in The...