Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (The Great American Novel, My Life as a Man, The Professor of Desire) (review)

expanding Roth’s achievements, but it is a more expansive and assured work than Everyman and one that certainly demonstrates that Roth is not yet ready to give up the ghost even if Zuckerman has. Reading late Roth feels a little like watching Roger Federer play tennis or Tiger Woods play golf. These are men whose mastery of their art is such that they are no longer concerned primarily with the day-to-day challenges of their profession. Their eyes are fixed on the bigger picture, on establishing their place in posterity, on the lasting legacy that they will leave in their respective fields. Roth may yet die before he lands the Nobel Prize. Exit Ghost is unlikely to nab a nomination for him, in spite of its incidental denunciations of George Bush, as it relives former glories rather than breaking new ground, but it is nonetheless unmistakably the work of a man who is at the top of his game and whose only rivals are not his contemporaries but the great past masters of the form such as Conrad. WORK CITED Roth, Philip. “It No Longer Feels a Great Injustice That I Have to Die.” Interview with Martin Krasnik. Trans. Sofie Paisley. Guardian 14 Dec. 2005. 18 July 2007 . University of Reading (U.K) David Brauner Copyright © 2008 Heldref Publications Ross Miller, ed. Philip Roth: Novels 1973–1977 (The Great American Novel, My Life as a Man, The Professor of Desire). New York: Library of America, 2006. 912 pp. $35.00. In 1973, neither Philip Roth nor his readers could have predicted that by the time he listed his books at the beginning of The Human Stain in 2000 there would be twenty-three of them. Or that he would come to classify them as “Zuckerman Books,” “Kepesh Books,” “Roth Books,” and “Other Books” and see all the books he published before 1977, except The Breast (1972), as among those “Others.” In retrospect, however, the novels included in the third volume of the Library of America’s collected Philip Roth—together with his 1973 short story “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or Looking at Kafka,” which is not included—mark a critical transition from the comic extravaganzas that followed Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) to characters, concerns, and strategies that would shape all he has written since. That he sensed this himself is clear from the stock-taking character of his 1974 interview with Joyce Carol Oates about his first eight books, reprinted in his ninth, Reading Myself and Others (1975). In that interview, he explained Reviews Philip Roth Studies 147 148 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2007 both his sense of his own career in the early 1970s and his struggle to write My Life as a Man (1974). It was a book he had been “writing, abandoning, and returning to ever since” Portnoy’s Complaint, he said, and while “My Life as a Man was simmering away on the ‘moral’ back burner” he wrote Our Gang (1971), The Breast, and The Great American Novel (1973). With the publication of My Life as a Man, he concluded, he felt as though he had “reached a natural break of sorts” in his work (“After Eight Books” 97). When The Great American Novel appeared in 1973, evoking adjectives describing it and the comic impulses behind it as blatant, coarse-grained, reckless, destructive, lawless, anarchic, unsocialized, low-minded, vulgar, aggressive, crude, obscene, deliberately perverse, irresponsible, unserious, and subversive—and these were just Roth’s own words (“On The Great American Novel” 65–80)—it certainly seemed like the end of some line. With its combination of comic inventiveness, farce, burlesque, slapstick, maniacal alliteration , and logorrhea, it was (and still is) both laugh-out-loud funny and often in cringe-inducingly bad taste. Like “On the Air,” the short story describing another American odyssey that he published in New American Review 10 (1970) and has so far never chosen to reprint, this mock epic tall tale of the wandering Ruppert Mundys Roth carried the comic impulses that he began to express in Portnoy’s Complaint as far as they could reasonably (or, perhaps, unreasonably) go. Rereading The Great American Novel reveals...