The Circus of Being a Man

Philip Roth may well be a pornographer, but he is definitely and first of all a moralist. Obscenity in his tragic farces is only a way of imposing shock therapy on readers who, like many characters in his novels, might confuse propriety and reality. Truth is never clean, and therefore literature itself cannot be clean. For Roth, the phallus has thus become an artistic evidence of the salutary violence which is needed to restore a full consciousness of what Man and Life are truly about.