Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (review)

Reviews Philip Roth Studies 177 this novel, wanting us “to remember that sex is a driving force in our lives, whether we acknowledge it or not” (198). Similarly, Margaret Smith’s “Autobiography : False Confession?” reminds us that the Freudian subject in the context of Roth’s autobiographical “maskings” defines itself negatively as “that which cannot be remembered” (106). Jay L. Halio in his contribution persuasively shows that “Eros successfully defies death in Sabbath’s theatre, but it remains still the overwhelming thrust in The Dying Animal” (205). The essays in Turning Up the Flame are uniformly excellent, and the introductory preface very clearly sets up the issues that the essays discuss. Both devoted and prospective readers of Roth’s later fiction will profit from this book. Trinity University, Texas Willis Salomon Derek Parker Royal, ed. Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Foreword by Daniel Walden. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. xi + 303 pp. $39.95. “Victor Hugo, alas!” Thus replied André Gide when asked to name the greatest French poet. Widespread recognition that Philip Roth is the most accomplished living American novelist also is begrudging, a residual effect of the critical mauling that Roth received early in his career from the formidable Irving Howe. The septuagenarian author of more than two dozen books, Roth continues to discomfit critics with devastating accounts of what it means to be male, American, Jewish, and human. None of the seventeen contributors to Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author takes issue with Time magazine’s decision, on 9 July 2001, to name Roth “America’s Best Novelist.” In his foreword to the volume, Daniel Walden, one of the grand old scholars of Jewish American letters, dubs Roth “deservedly one of the grand men, even the grand old men, of Jewish American letters” (viii). The book’s editor, Derek Parker Royal, claims Roth is “the novelist who has done more than any other recent writer to establish the parameters of contemporary fiction” (7). Without questioning his position in the literary canon, Royal’s collection attempts to establish the parameters of Roth’s fiction and—in a concluding piece by Darren Hughes—nonfiction. Arranged to track the chronology of Roth’s career, the essays encompass his oeuvre published through 2004. The cover photograph, taken through the slatted panes of his study window, catches Roth gazing at a sheet in his typewriter and invites the outsider to scrutinize one of the most exquisitely self-conscious of American authors. Roth has been steadily productive since his provocative debut in 1959 with Goodbye, Columbus, and Royal’s book provides a cartography of Roth country, a navigational guide to fictional creations that include the Zuckerman books, the Kepesh books, the Roth books, and the American trilogy, among other 178 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2005 writings. Noting that “[n]o novelist of our time has shed skins so eagerly” (149), Benjamin Hedin offers this dermal taxonomy: “two early, Dreiserian looks at Midwestern gentility; the exuberant satires of the post-Portnoy era; the Zuckerman romans à clef; an original brand of metafiction in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock; a pair of memoirs that are strikingly different in tone and execution; and the masterly amalgam of social realism and historical fiction that is the recent American trilogy” (150). That inventory omits Goodbye, Columbus and The Plot Against America, each the subject of an essay by Jessica G. Rabin and Alan Cooper, respectively. Hedin claims that, along with Franz Kafka, Roth has created “the definitive twentieth-century fiction on the condition of being a son” (143). Yet neither has Roth neglected daughters. Julie Husband, for one, reclaims the neglected Letting Go and When She Was Good as dialogues with the emerging women’s movement of the 1960s. As if to counter the recurrent resentment that Roth’s fictions are an exclusively male meshugas, eight essayists in the collection are women. All seventeen essays lead the reader back through plots and characters, highlighting common themes such as family, ethnicity, sexuality, celebrity, Israel, the Holocaust, and the American Dream. Several critics note the pervasive tension between art and life in Roth’s self-conscious narrative; how, as Margaret Smith observes, his fiction is largely about...