Turning Up the Flame: Philip Roth's Later Novels (review)

Reviews Philip Roth Studies 175 Reviews Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel, eds. Turning Up the Flame: Philip Roth’s Later Novels. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005. 223 pp. $42.50. The editors of Turning Up the Flame: Philip Roth’s Later Novels define the “later” Roth as the fiction of “the last two decades or so.” But as the essays in this volume make variously clear, Roth’s “later fiction” designates more than a temporal period. According to editors Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel, Roth’s later novels brim with “experimental, challenging, even outrageous” narrative strategies that exceed “all critical expectation” (7). Most of the essays in this volume focus on the blurring of fact and fiction as the dominant preoccupation of Roth’s later novels. Several of the essays further identify the fact-fiction question as Roth’s primary medium for the exploration of deep thematic concerns: identity (both personal and “Jewish”), aesthetic marginalization, the symbolic importance of Israel, the cultural history of America, and the post-Freudian fixation on sex and death. Ben Siegel’s introductory essay, “Reading Philip Roth: Facts and Fancy, Fiction and Autobiography,” brings the reader thoroughly up to date on past discussions of the fact-fiction question in Roth criticism. In Roth’s later fiction, according to Siegel, “strategies for narrative expression become strategies for self-discovery and self-definition” that are always connected to the question of “what it means to be a Jew” (25–26). Roth’s complex narrative strategies for unfolding the overdetermined conjuncture of ostensible autobiography and rhetorical play occupy Debra Shostak’s “Philip Roth’s Fictions of Self-Exposure.” Shostak shows how Roth “makes capital out of his reader’s inclinations toward biographical interpretations of his work” (31) by “promising an ‘objective’ truth and then failing to deliver” (52). As Shostak sees it, Roth uses self-reference as a kind of seduction, a “gambit ” to bring his readers to the point of losing “assurance that [autobiography] records subjectivity rather than evanescent subject-positions” (53). Similarly, Derek Parker Royal’s “Texts, Lives, and Bellybuttons: Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and the Renegotiation of Subjectivity” focuses on the “postmodern assumptions and structures underlying Roth’s work” (“the decentered subject,” “metafiction ,” and “the breakdown of traditional narrative”) to analyze connections between self-conscious narrative strategy and the complications of ethnic identity (73). In an excellent reading of Operation Shylock, Royal argues that Roth “brings the postmodern ‘play’ of textual creation into the realm of the Jewish experience” (74). These essays, then, concern themselves with what Alexis Kate Wilson calls, in “The Travels of the American Talush,” the way that “questions of Jewish identity are profoundly coupled with postmodern questions of ‘what is real?’” (96). 176 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2005 Unsurprisingly, given the narrative complexities of personal and cultural identity in Roth’s later fiction, this collection also contains arguments that dialectically reverse assumptions about Roth’s positive postmodern constructions of subjectivity . For example, Timothy L. Parrish’s cleverly titled and astutely argued “The End of Identity: Philip Roth’s Jewish American Pastoral ” sees Roth “dramatizing what we might call the self’s essential elusiveness” in American Pastoral (131). At the same time, however, Parrish convincingly shows how the novel “invokes the end of identity [in the twinned figures of Swede Lebov, “running out of being” and Zuckerman running out of narrative] as a way of summoning death and acknowledging that, despite endless resurrections, his Zuckerman must eventually disappear into silence” (148). Parrish sees American Pastoral’s preoccupation with exhaustion and death ultimately as a humble “filial tribute” to the “cultural wisdom” of Roth’s “American Jewish fathers” in the name of “the Jew who remains” (147–48). Andrew Gordon also sees American Pastoral as a fantasy representing its own felt limitations. In “The Critique of Utopia in Philip Roth’s The Counterlife and American Pastoral,” Gordon remarks that “Roth paradoxically ends up clinging to certain pastoral ideals, contrasting the wonderful lost America of his Newark childhood in the 1940s to the fallen America of the 1960s and 1970s” (151), and, because of this fantasy of simplicity, the novel is “death-haunted ” (156) and “structured like a tragedy” (157...