Reading Roth Reading Roth: A [New] Philip Roth Reader by Salomé Osório (review)

In Reading Roth Reading Roth: A [New] Philip Roth Reader, Salomé Osório traces the shifts in Philip Roth’s inexhaustible gift for self-reflection, hoping not only to define and reassess his position in Reading Myself and Others (1975) in the light of his later works, but also to justify an updated and current version of Roth’s A Philip Roth Reader (1980). Given that thirty years and more than half of Roth’s career have elapsed between then and now, this aim is certainly a valid one. Still, the title alone exposes the complexity of such a task, and as Osório wades through the complexities of Roth’s various self-referential characters and themes, she takes care to lay out her three-step argument with as much clarity as possible. She demonstrates that however hyper-aware and objective Roth strives to be (and usually succeeds in being), it is impossible to assume that his past analyses will remain sound when placed in the context of his later body of work. Instead, she exposes the places where Roth’s classification of his work should be recognized by readers as outdated, leading the way to a more intricate and belated interpretation of Roth’s literary progression.

Appropriately, Osório pays special attention to the works that mark a change in the trajectory of Roth’s writing, following a developmental trail that the Roth of the first edition of Reading Myself and Others had not anticipated. For instance, she singles out My Life as a Man (1974) as “the (first) turning point in Roth’s career” (29). While Roth classifies this novel somewhat dismissively under the heading “Other Books” along with his earliest works, its fractured narrative structure points the way toward The Counterlife (1986) and “Zuckerman’s constant refocusing of his own identity through the different versions of himself and others” (29). Suitably, Osório deems The Counterlife to be the next landmark in Roth’s career, arguing that its preoccupation with the alternate possibilities of Zuckerman’s life and writing reveals “a deeper concern with identity and the desire to understand the Jewish ethnic self” than Roth had previously expressed (30). Although Osório does not delve too deeply into the evolution of Roth’s thinking here, she nonetheless proposes that it is the genesis of a whole period of “Roth” novels, during which he writes about his life in the context of non-fiction (The Facts [1988], and Patrimony: A True Story [1991]), or uses a narrator named after himself (Deception [1990], Operation Shylock [1993]), blurring the lines between fiction and reality even further.

Roth seems to transform again when he returns to Zuckerman as both a narrator and authorial device eleven years after The Counterlife. The Zuckerman of this later trilogy, American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2001), is indicative of Roth’s own maturation, in that the reader must confront an aging narrator made impotent and incontinent by cancer. As a result, this Zuckerman has eschewed his own life to live through the stories of others. Osório notes that these novels are linked by “an elegiac tone as they pay tribute to dead friends,” creating, in hindsight, interesting implications for Zuckerman’s previous inability to write a eulogy for his brother’s funeral in The Counterlife. Such elements show “Roth coming to terms with his own mortality as he experiences his human fragility” (68). While Roth previously left Zuckerman works out the first edition of Reading Myself and Others, later editions (1985 and 2001) both add material concerned with Zuckerman. This suggests some growing awareness on Roth’s part of Zuckerman’s importance and relevance to his work as a whole.

After finishing this later Zuckerman trilogy, Roth returned to the character of Kepesh, the narrator of the (much) earlier The Breast (1972) and The Professor of Desire (1977), with The Dying Animal...