Roth on the American Screen: "Serious" Literature and Popular Democracy

Philip Roth seemed to endorse Leo Glucksman's thesis in I Married a Communist (1998)—that politics, "the great generalizer," stands in "an antagonistic relationship" to literature, "the great particularizer" (606)—during the public address he gave upon his eightieth birthday. Roth pronounced, "a fervor for the singular and a profound aversion to generalities is fiction's lifeblood" ("The Ruthless Intimacy" 393). Glucksman, however, made his declaration from the margins of a novel profoundly concerned with national politics—a novel, moreover, which participates in a trilogy that initiated what Bryan Cheyette calls the "national turn" in Roth's late career (163). The tensions between the mission of what Glucksman defines as "serious literature" (Communist 607) and readings of Roth's fiction's salience, or instrumentality, in national politics are only heightened when that fiction is adapted for the screen. This essay examines these tensions within two 2016 screen adaptations of Roth's fiction: Ewan McGregor's American Pastoral and James Schamus's Indignation.