Reading Philip Roth Edited by Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson (review)

REVIEWS Milbauer, Asher Z. and Donald G. Watson, eds. Reading Philip Roth. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. 205 pp. Cloth: $27.50. Although he began publishing in the 1950s, it was not until Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 that Philip Roth became a popular—and controversial—writer. To some historians of the literary marketplace, that novel more than any other domesticated pornography for mainstream readers, and to some of his several Jewish audiences, it signaled the most overt cultural betrayal of one of their own. The high-decibel response to Portnoy turned out to be a fortunate episode in Roth's career. Not only did it bring the young novelist instant name recognition, it also generated the matter of the best of his subsequent fiction: the good writer, his integrity on the line, in conflict with the good son confronting pieties that demand attention. To many of his readers, as Hana Wirth-Nesher observes in this new collection of essays, Roth began as "an enfant terrible and matured into an informer" primarily because he internalized the hostile and sensationalistic responses in such a way that the drama "between the Jewish writer bent on freely expressing his desires in his art and his moralistic readers bent on denouncing him becomes the central subject of his fiction" (pp. 21-23). When The Counterlife was published in 1986, Philip Roth at a middle-aged fifty-three could look with considerable satisfaction on his life as a writer. Wirth-Nesher is one of thirteen critics commissioned by Milbauer and Watson for new essays on Roth that might suggest "fresh ways of looking at his corpus of fiction" (p. x). All are well-conceived and some are beautifully executed, although the "fresh ways" these critics see are often extensions of previous perspectives. While Roth has disclaimed the title "Jewish-American writer," critics for a quarter of a century have understandably placed him within a Jewish-American cultural tradition. And though the focus of nearly half of the essays in Reading Philip Roth explores this writer's relation to European Jewry and the American immigrant experience (and a healthy number re-examines Roth in the light of social realism and modernism), even those pieces that are readings of specific works implicitly enfold Roth in a larger cultural context. One of the recurring motifs in this collection is the disparity between Roth's New Jersey upbringing and the Holocaust experience of his European elders; another is the consonance of Roth's aesthetic imagination with American themes, specifically, as Sam B. Girgus lists them, "problems of love, sexuality, and moral development" (p. 135). As we might expect, Roth's influential precursors most commonly invoked in these pages are Kafka, Gogol, Freud, and James; one of the most refreshing observations (unfortunately undeveloped) comes from Jonathan Brent: that Nathan Zuckerman is a "uniquely American type," his nihilism "a peculiarly American strain" (p. 188). Martin Tucker shrewdly sees Roth as an "autobiographic tabulator" (p. 34) whose theme is the search for the lost place; Estelle Gershgoren Novak demonstrates (for too long) that all the major protagonists share membership in the "spiritual diaspora" (p. 50). Patrick O'Donnell's study of "textual veils" (p. 146) in My Life as a Man is a more sophisticated essay than his earlier study of texts in The Ghost Writer. In two of the best contributions, Martin Green discusses Roth's anti-aesthetic commitment in novels that aggressively celebrate acquisitiveness and carnality, and Donald Kartiganer gracefully connects the matter of Roth's corpus (the gap between the author's Newark experience and the intellectual tradition of European Jewry) to the Rothian manner ("the novelistic discontent with the containments of the realistic mode") (pp. 84, 90). As the second edition of Bernard Rodgers' Roth Bibliography (1984) indicates, the stature of Philip Roth has been rising impressively in the past decade. Thanks to Ben Siegel, Judith Jones and Guinevera Nance, Hermione Lee, and others, we now know that Roth's celebrated realism is not the simple mode it was once taken to be. Morton Levitt's fine essay on Roth's relationship to Kafka (available in Sanford Pinsker's 1982 edition of Critical Essays on Philip...