Philip Roth
by Gabriel Roth
The career of Philip Roth, serious contender for America’s greatest novelist, has arrived at a charged juncture: the interval between Roth’s retirement in 2012, at the age of 79, and his death some time in the next quarter-century. (Is it rude to mention that he’s going to die? He’s been reminding us for more than a decade.) And that gives us an occasion to consider Roth’s entire corpus as the work of a living writer, before the books are moved into the separate stacks where we study or neglect the dead.¹
No other novelist has a narrative like Roth’s: the enfant terrible who settles into an engaged middle age making spiky satires and experiments... and who then, without warning, begins a hair-raising run of masterpieces that make everything up to that point look like a warm-up. In hindsight, Roth’s books organize themselves into four periods: a decade of finding his voice, two decades of trial and error, an imperial phase, and a dying fall.
To start at the beginning, though: Goodbye, Columbus has all the attributes of the classic American first novel. It’s a swift coming-of-age story about a young man in love with a woman he can’t see clearly, taking place over the course of an intense summer. It’s also about two different kinds of Jewish families that used to exist, the pushy strivers and the WASPily assimilated, and how they look down on each other. It’s a near-perfect example of the form—few mature novelists display the chops Roth had his first time out—but today the satirical elements seem foreign, almost anthropological.
