How Telling: Irving Howe, Roth's Early Career, and the Dialectic of Impersonation in The Anatomy Lesson

Most formidable of all the criticisms of Philip Roth's early works was Irving Howe's 1972 essay published in Commentary, in which the great critic judged Roth to be a mean-spirited satirist (most dramatically in Portnoy's Complaint) who lacked a viable literary tradition and any sympathetic engagement with the ennobling dimension of human community—specifically, the contemporary American Jewish community—and had an inclination toward monologic schtick that was altogether "vulgar." This essay proposes that Howe was more or less right, if not necessarily for the right reasons, about the shortcomings of Roth's early work. Furthermore, Roth's own ironical and persistent responses to Howe's criticisms, which over time effectively shaped the emergence of a newly dialectical style marking the transition from the early Roth, a highly skilled satirist, to the late Roth, perhaps the most accomplished American novelist of his generation. More particularly, the invention of Zuckerman as autobiographical lens in the first Zuckerman trilogy—especially, in The Anatomy Lesson (1983)—opened a dialectical space in Roth's fiction from within which he could interrogate all attempts to read him as a practitioner of modern roman à clef and easy satirical one-upsmanship while also beginning to engage some of the very categories of human experience Howe had accused him of neglecting.