Creative force

David Mattin

• Last Updated: November 22. 2009 7:26PM UAE / November 22. 2009 3:26PM GMT

Philip Roth has experienced “an extraordinary late flowering”, David Mattin says. Richard Drew / AP

Philip Roth must be accustomed by now to being called America’s greatest living writer. His extraordinary productivity in the past decade has brought forth novels at a rate of more than one every two years, and upon each publication critics queue to rehearse the superlatives: Roth is a genius, they tell us, the pre-eminent chronicler of that strange, accelerated, furious place that is early 21st-century America. Surely, they say, the Nobel is long overdue.

And the literary world is at it again with the publication of Roth’s 30th novel, The Humbling, about a stage actor who fears that his talent has deserted him. While many agree that it is not Roth’s best novel, even the least favourable reviews include passages about his deserved reputation and undisputed mastery of the novel.

But it wasn’t always this way. For much of the 1980s, Roth’s name was one that few critics would have put on a list of top living novelists. After 1969’s Portnoy’s Complaint vaulted him into fame, his profile waned. Apart from a core band of devotees, Roth came to be considered something of a curiosity or sideshow – a novelist of clear talents, yes, but too prone to filling books with the manifold fears and urges that beset middle-aged, neurotic, New York intellectuals such as himself to be considered a writer of great importance.

How strange it is to remember this now. Roth experienced an extraordinary late flowering of creativity, defying the career fall that seemed laid out for him, and claimed his greatest success in his 70s. But just how, exactly, has he redoubled his productivity at an age when most novelists are finished? And what makes the fiction that Roth has produced in the past 15 years so important?

Certainly, his career has been an uneven ride. An early glimpse of much that would follow was presented by the 1959 publication of his first novel, Goodbye Columbus, which won a National Book Award as well as criticism from conservative rabbis, who called Roth a “self-hating Jew”.

Two well-received novels followed. Then Portnoy’s Complaint brought full-scale literary superstardom and controversy to match. The book presents the explicit, hilarious, wildly digressive monologue of Alexander Portnoy, who longs to liberate himself from his closeted Jewish upbringing. It spoke powerfully to a generation living the sexual revolution, and Roth became America’s most famous author overnight. But there was a price: “In 1969 I wrote Portnoy,” Roth later said. “Not only did I write it – that was easy – but I also became ‘the author of Portnoy’s Complaint’, and what I faced publicly was the trivialisation of everything.”

There followed a backlash, both against the book’s obscenities and its critique of Jewish conservatism. The eminent Jewish-American critic Irving Howe coined the most famous summary of the anti-Roth movement: “The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy’s Complaint is read it twice.”

Roth’s response was a long, self-destructive leave of absence. He travelled to Czechoslovakia, then took up residence with his second wife, the English actress Claire Bloom, in Kensington, London, for half of every year. Meanwhile, his books came to be dominated by a fictional alter-ego, the author Nathan Zuckerman, from behind whom Roth produced a series of novels on the tortured relationship between writer and work.

But Roth’s reputation was waning. According to the barbed memoir that Bloom later wrote of their time together, Leaving a Doll’s House, Roth checked himself into Connecticut’s Silver Hill clinic on the verge of suicide in 1993, after his attempt at a revival, Operation Shylock, failed to impress. The following year, Roth and Bloom divorced acrimoniously amid Bloom’s claims that he was “cruel, erratic and spectacularly manipulative”. The subject of incessant highbrow gossip and facing increasing literary irrelevance, Roth, it seemed, had bottomed out.

It’s no surprise, in retrospect, that his rehabilitation came via his return to America. It is clear now that the critics who made so much of Roth’s Jewishness during his early career missed the defining truth about him: Roth is above all else an American novelist, plugged into the country’s consciousness in a way only a few others – William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, John Updike – could claim.

It must be admitted that there is little sign in The Humbling of that fine-tuned sensibility. The novella – short even by novella standards – is resolutely minor Roth, ushering the reader in somewhat predictable style through an existential crisis. The familiar Rothian toughness of language and intelligence are there, but there is none of the blistering engagement with the world that marked his return from the wilderness 12 years ago.

Born in 1933 to first-generation Americans, Roth was raised in and shaped by Newark, New Jersey: its industry, its hard-won affluence, its investment in the uniquely American insistence on continual self-creation. After his divorce from Bloom, Roth returned to New Jersey and its neighbour, New York, in late 1994. A remarkable reinvigoration began.

“I used to walk around New York saying under my breath: ‘I’m back! I’m back!’” he said later. “Being home, being free in my personal life brought a great revival of energy.

“The great American writers are all regionalists. Think of Faulkner and Mississippi. I hadn’t discovered my own place, the town across the river called Newark.”

He also discovered the great currents of post-Second World War American history on to which Newark provided a window. In 1997 came American Pastoral, about a Newark businessman and former star athlete whose American dream explodes when his daughter becomes a 1960s counter-culture radical. In I Married a Communist, a year later, the radio star Ira Ringold is destroyed at the hands of McCarthyists. And in 2000, The Human Stain took the pulse of a Clinton-era, scandal-beset America with the story of Coleman Silk, a university professor forced to resign after being accused of racism. Each of the novels was narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, the alter-ego that had seemed, a few years before, resolutely stuck in a hall of mirrors.

These books, which have become known as Roth’s American Triology, were muscular and impassioned, densely argued, packed with American history and zeitgeist. Roth received the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award. In 1998, President Bill Clinton gave him the National Medal of Arts, declaring: “What William Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Philip Roth has done for Newark.” The trilogy, said the great critic Harold Bloom, was the result of “an almost Shakespearean outburst of creativity”.

So how did Roth engineer such a remarkable turnaround? One of the foremost among a new generation of young American novelists, Keith Gessen, the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and the editor of the influential literary magazine n+1, has been a close observer.

“Ten years ago, when I reviewed The Human Stain, I certainly felt that Roth needed to be defended as a serious writer,” Gessen says. “Now that seems totally bizarre.

“For a decade he’d been criticised for being too inward-looking. But we should remember that he responded during that period by only going deeper, by writing more about Nathan Zuckerman. Eventually, he went so deep into the consciousness of that character that he came out of the other side, into society.”

With the American Trilogy, Gessen says, a master craftsman turns his attention to contemporary America with a unique determination. “What you sense in those books is a powerful insistence that they keep pace with the reality of America now and do justice to it. That’s part of why Roth continues to produce a book almost every year; he just refuses to quit in this race to document the culture. That makes him very exhilarating to read.” 

When, in 2005, the Library of America announced an eight-volume edition of Roth’s collected works – making him one of three writers to be so honoured during their lifetimes – his assault on the canon of American fiction was complete.

These days, Roth presides over a fiercely disciplined life at his secluded farmhouse in north-west Connecticut, rising at 6am to write (he stands at a lectern in order to avoid aggravating an old back injury). When the Connecticut winter becomes too harsh, he decamps to an apartment on New York’s Upper West Side.

Only the Nobel Prize eludes him. “I try not to think about it,” he says. 

His remarkable productivity shows no sign of abating, and in the last few years Roth has released a string of short, terse novels in which he seems increasingly preoccupied with mortality. Some, such as 2006’s Everyman, in which an unnamed protagonist meditates on his impending death, have met his almost impossibly high standard. Others, such as 2008’s Indignation, have seemed (much like The Humbling) comparatively flimsy, unremarkable affairs, footnotes in his oeuvre.

The prodigious output makes it easy to forget that Roth is now 76. Has he, then, exited his own, remarkable late golden age?

We’ve been at this turn once before, and we’ve learnt that brave – or foolish – must be the reader who counts out Philip Roth.