The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (review)

150 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2007 of Desire is something else entirely. It may have begun as a kind of prequel to the earlier story, and its conflicts and characters may be another variation on those of Portnoy’s Complaint. But its tone and treatment of those materials is radically different, more like a reworking of elements from My Life as a Man. Even if his dreams belong to Kafka, Kepesh’s emotions, thoughts, and writing are just as intimately bound up with Chekhov’s stories and vision. Especially in the novel’s last movement (820–69), where Roth achieves a quiet tenderness , a heart-wrenching sense of imminent loss and irreconcilable desires, that he had never captured so fully before but would regularly achieve again in the years that have followed—most recently in Everyman (2005) and Exit Ghost (2007). WORKS CITED Roth, Philip. “After Eight Books.” Interview with Joyce Carol Oates. 1974. Roth, Reading 85–97. ———. “On The Great American Novel. Roth, Reading 65–80. ———. Reading Myself and Others. 1975. New York: Vintage, 2001. Bard College at Simon’s Rock Bernard F. Rodgers Jr. Copyright © 2008 Heldref Publications Timothy Parrish, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. xi + 179 pp. $75.00/$27.99. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth demonstrates the vigor, vitality, and excellence that constitute contemporary Philip Roth studies. The volume is a collection of eleven essays from leading Roth scholars, each dealing with some of the larger subjects that are typically associated with the writer and bearing titles such as “Roth and Gender,” “Roth and the Holocaust,” and “Roth and Israel.” In an academic climate that values the critical monograph over the edited collection, it is refreshing to find an edited collection that combines the judicious, long-view approach of the academic monograph with the eclecticism of coverage that only the edited collection can offer. Parrish’s thoughtful, finely tuned volume is precisely that, and it deserves to be ranked alongside some of the better Roth monographs that have appeared recently. What is immediately striking when first approaching the volume are the confluences across the various essays: themes and issues in Victoria Aarons’s essay on “Eli the Fanatic” and other early short stories from the Goodbye, Reviews Philip Roth Studies 151 Columbus collection (1959) are touched on in Michael Rothberg’s essay on Roth and the Holocaust, whereas Emily Miller Budick’s work on the author and Israel reflects on texts and themes that recur in Parrish’s essay on Roth and ethnic identity. This is indicative of a very healthy intellectual debate and discussion , a mutual immersion in the work and ideas of fellow Roth scholars, to say nothing of the real feat of editing for which Parrish is to be commended. The reader will identify the steady hand of the editor throughout the volume in terms of both the shape of the essays—each essay begins by way of introducing its themes, briefly sets up its theoretical methodology, and then launches into often illuminating close textual analysis—and the shape of the collection as a whole. The volume loosely follows a chronological path through Roth’s writing, beginning with Goodbye, Columbus and ending with Hana Wirth-Nesher’s fine study of The Plot Against America (2004) as an example of Roth’s autobiographical writing. Moreover, when reading the volume from start to finish, there is a clear sense of narrative progression: where one author leaves off, another picks up. For example, Josh Cohen’s close engagement with Freudian theories and Rothian doubles in Operation Shylock (1993) tallies satisfactorily with Jeffrey Berman’s work on the actual psychoanalytical essays of Hans J. Kleinschmidt and their relevance for My Life as a Man (1974). Debra Shostak’s essay on gender, which immediately follows, picks up the baton by beginning with reference to the 1974 text. Furthermore , many of the authors, such as Donald Kartinganer, Mark Shechner, Cohen, and Berman, align their readings with the trajectory of the author’s life which is not only appropriate but in each case thoroughly convincing, given Roth’s well-documented entanglements with his texts. All of the essays in this volume merit...