Corpus Rothi: Une lecture de Philip Roth by Steven Sampson, and: Corpus Rothi II: Le Philip Roth tardif, de Pastorale américaine à Némésis by Steven Sampson (review)

As critic Ross Posnock has argued, Roth’s work invites us to read it as a single unfolding text, containing not only recurring themes and the recurring presence of Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh, and various versions of a character named “Philip Roth,” but also an ongoing internal commentary on the meaning of the work. From the mockery of the character Milton Appel, based on the critic Irving Howe’s early appraisal of Roth, to the comic riffs on literary fame in Zuckerman Unbound, to the unstable account-taking of The Facts, to Zuckerman’s self-critical exploration of the aftermath Carnovsky (Zuckerman’s version of Portnoy’s Complaint) this running commentary taunts Roth’s would-be critics, suggesting that he has anticipated every angle, returned every possible volley, and had a bit of fun while doing it.

In his two volume study of Roth’s works, Steven Sampson, an American with a background in publishing who received a PhD at Paris VII and writes in French, stakes out a distinct response to this challenge: he tries to get in on the fun. At the start of the second volume, he goes so far as to imagine a “counter-interview” with a “phantom” Roth who banters with him in a play on the embedded dialogues from Exit Ghost. Elsewhere Sampson riffs on Roth’s jokes, wordplay, and character names, includes epigraphs from Billy Idol, John Keats, and John Lennon, and offers up his own puns. He even stages a reading of When She Was Good around the resonances on the letter W.

Like Roth, Sampson pays attention to his comic timing, maintaining a brisk and agreeable pace while discussing the vast majority of Roth’s books through the mostly short impressionistic chapters that compose his two volumes. Not surprisingly, given his approach, there’s a particular emphasis on those works with the broadest comic strokes: Portnoy’s Complaint gets a chapter in each volume, and there’s an enjoyable section devoted to the short piece “I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting; or Looking at Kafka,” which imagines the writer’s later years as a Hebrew School teacher in New Jersey. Like the fans of director Sandy Bates in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (and perhaps not coincidently, Allen comes up several times here), Sampson is drawn to the old funny ones.

While Sampson is not concerned with situating his ideas in relation to other critics and their claims, he does put together a loose argument: namely, that Roth’s works taken as a whole can be read as a kind of parody of the New Testament, with Roth himself and his various stand-ins playing the role of Christ, hounded by sexual persecutions before finally transforming into something of an artistic holy spirit. He playfully guides us through the psycho-sexual march of Roth’s recurring protagonists: Goodbye Columbus, Letting Go and When She Was Good are described as “the seduction” before the “orgasm” of Portnoy. Beginning his chapter on that work, he announces, “It is time to return to the egg and the sperm.” Later he notes that the names David Kepesh and Claire Ovington, his fiancée in The Professor of Desire, evoke the phallus and the egg.

Into these riffs on Roth’s seemingly infinite ways of describing and invoking the body in all its desires and discontents, Sampson highlights the traces of that other bodily language, the one that would turn God into a suffering body in the name of literal transcendence. “Crucifixes are sexy because there’s a naked man on them,” reads an epigraph from Madonna, and Sampson shows how Newark’s bard of Jews and goys draws from the same mix of titillation...