Philip Roth by Hermione Lee (review)

Reissued as part of the “Routledge Revivals” series of classic studies in the Social Sciences and Humanities, Hermione Lee’s 1982 monograph on Roth features a new Foreword by the author but is otherwise entirely unrevised. The book begins unfortunately, for reasons that have nothing to do with Lee. On its inside cover, it makes the claim that the book, on its first appearance, “was the first full-length study of Philip Roth as a major twentieth-century writer” (n.p.). This is at best a half-truth. There had in fact been three previous books published on Roth: John N. McDaniels’ The Fiction of Philip Roth (1974), Sanford Pinsker’s The Comedy That “Hoits”: An Essay on the Fiction of Philip Roth (1975) and Bernard Rodgers’ Philip Roth (1978), not to mention Glen Meeter’s early comparative study Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth: A Critical Essay (1968) and Judith Paterson Jones and Guinevera A. Nance’s edited collection of essays, Philip Roth (1981). Pinsker’s book is, as its title suggests, more an extended essay than a monograph (an objection one might also raise with respect to Lee’s book, which only runs to 95 pages), but the same cannot be said of McDaniel’s and Rodgers’s studies. It might be argued that neither McDaniel nor Rodgers actually treat Roth as “a major twentieth-century writer”—to do so would have been rather presumptuous, given that, particularly in the case of the former, they were writing about an oeuvre that was still relatively small, and about a writer who was still in his early forties—but then Lee herself admits that she did not think of Roth at the time of her study as “a great, serious, monumental figure in American literature,” but, rather more modestly, as “exciting, noisy and reckless” (Foreword, n.p.). At any rate, it seems rather ungenerous of Routledge to erase McDaniel and Rodgers from the bibliographical record. Then again, when one reads the second paragraph on this page, which features a typo—referring to the stand-up comedian Henny Youngman as “Henry”—and a description of Roth (“a highly literary and referential character”) that might have come straight out of a (not particularly good) freshman paper, the suspicion may begin to form that the overstatement of the originality of Lee’s book might simply be part of a general sloppiness. This impression is confirmed by the announcement, on the following page, that this edition “includes a new Introduction by the author” (n.p.). There is no introduction, let alone an Introduction, simply a brief Foreword.

None of this detracts from the quality of Lee’s study, which was, on original publication, certainly the best, if not the first, serious study of Roth, and which remains well worth reading. It was, as Lee rightly says, “[i]mpossible to predict [in 1982 . . . ] that [. . .] Roth would dominate world literature in the 1990s and early 2000s” and would become “one of the most venerated and legendary of all living writers” (Foreword, n.p.), but many of the gifts that were only recognized after the publication of Lee’s book are clearly identified, and brilliantly demonstrated, in it. Lee’s main subjects—“Jewish sons, Jewish novelists and Jewish jokes,” “American reality” and “the search for self”—are all thoughtfully and persuasively explored, many of her observations ringing as true now, thirty years and twenty books further into Roth’s career, as they did when she made them. Others need to be qualified in the light of subsequent developments. For example, when Lee notes that “Writing about Roth is rendered at once easy and difficult by the fact that he has already said about himself much of what needs to be said” (17), we might add that it has been made both more difficult and easier by the large body of criticism that has been published on him in the last two decades. And when she asserts that “Roth’s Jewish-American childhood is the basis for his fiction” (24) and that “He...