Philip Roth, the Great American Novelist

...We can see this best in the opening pages of The Professor of Desire, set at the Hungarian Royale, a Catskills hotel...

...it between them...

...The question, thus, is not, Is It Good for the Jews...

...The Royale is the summer residence of the Kings of the dry-goods business the Rollmops King, for example (who makes an appearance in Zuckerman Un bound as well...

...Nathan, your story, as far as Gentiles are concerned, is about one thing and one thing only . . . . It is about kikes...

...This is Roth's defense...

...There is no why...

...One-two-three you were barmitzvah, and that for you was the end of your religious education...

...Alex Portnoy, the protagonist of Philip Roth's Portnoy 's Complaint, rails and rails against Judaism and Jewishness, against the hypocrisies and neuroses forced upon him by his Jewish parents, and yet, when he proposes to the girl he loves-a shiksa, of course, that is, a Gentile-he says: "And you'll convert, right...

...David suddenly decides his father is going to die in his house, and buys, surreptitiously, an oxygen machine, in case anything should go wrong...

...He sees her as his salvation: "Oh, marry me, Anne Frank, exonerate me before my outraged elders of this idiotic indictment...

...Yet he is, and always has been, considered an anti-SemiticJew by many of his own faith, a harsh and cruel caricaturist of a people that so recently had nearly been decimated simply because they existed...

...We also have the facts of our ancestry, our family, our membership in a race and in a religion...

...But most of the time he is on target...

...Do you know men study their whole lives in the Jewish religion, and when they die they still haven't finished...

...The Jewish question" was of course hotly debated in the nineteenth century, but at that time the problem with Judaism was inextricably linked to religion and to the religious practices which led Jews to adopt a strange sartorial style and a closed community...

...His fiction has appeared in Harper's...

...most of his books deal directly with Philip's divorce, Philip's affairs, Philip's crazy friends...

...Yet he is, I think, underrated, and often has been praised for the wrong reasons: for his willingness to speak frankly about sex and masturbation (Rosh as liberator), his "honesty" about Jews (Rosh as fearless investigative reporter), and his black humor (Rosh as pop-icon Lenny Bruce...

...This "Jewish question" that lies at the bottom of all of Roth's work is what has brought charges of anti-Semitism on his head...

...He has not succeeded, but in his pursuit of the answer he has become the premier chronicler of modern Jewish life...

...Gin, by the way.'' ''Oh, you caught me with my pants down, you sob...

...Around Lonoff's house that weekend flits Amy Bellette, a striking young foreigner who bears some resemblance to Anne Frank...

...Now, one of Roth's major limitations as a novelist is that he cannot escape himself...

...A man keeps calling him on the phone demanding $50,000...

...In more savage days, Ronald Nimkin of Portnoy's Complaint commits suicide at the age of fifteen, leaving pinned to his body the following note to his mother: ''Mrs...

...This is the real "Jewish question" of our day: Why do American Jews still feel like Jews when they do not have to...

...Don't make it worse than it already is...

...A newcomer will have barely settled into a varnished wicker rocker on the veranda before one of the oldtimers arrived from the hot city the previous week starts giving him the lowdown on this wonder of our tribe...

...Alex may cry out about "all that saga shit...

...He looks to Lonoff, secluded in the Berkshire hills for many years, as his example: Like Lonoff, he decides, he will remove himself from the world and devote himself to "art...

...So, The Ghost Writer is essentially the story of a young writer with a bad conscience...

...There is something in it to offend everybody: The die-hard assimilationists bristle at the thought that there is any difference between the way Jews behave and the way everyone else behaves...

...It is, instead, to be fled from...

...Lonoff (Bernard Malamud, in fact, although I think some elements of Henry Roth, the author of the brilliant thirties novel Call It Sleep are included as well...

...The Ghost Writer is the story of a night spent at the house of the great Jewish short-story writer, E.I...

...Lonoff has ignored his family and his wife in pursuit of his "calling...

...Roth does tell the truth...

...Now, however, as Judaism itself grows more vague, the ''Jewish question" becomes an entirely opaque concept, coming down basically to the commitment Diaspora Jews feel to the State of Israel and even down to the "rights" of Israel itself, which, despite some rather strongg democratic tendencies, still troubles a great many nominal liberals merely by being around...

...and those (among whom I -' ; have to include myself) who bounce around between these two poles and just cannot escape the thought that there is, for all -~, Roth's brilliance and dazzle, something wrong...

...He does not sensationalize, either...

...Women who have never stepped inside a synagogue write fierce articles demanding women rabbis...

...Nathan has come to visit during a crisis in his life...

...It evokes the most contradictory of responses: As Portnoy goes into lurid detail about his sordid autoerotic misadventures, one is repelled, one takes grim pleasure in the accuracy of description, one laughs, one is sickened...

...Do you know history...

...Barbatnik and my father lie alone and insensate, each in his freshly made bed...

...Fourteen-year-old Alexander Portnoy, the Communist atheist, is berated by his father: "And what about the Jewish people...

...Has Nathan, in pursuit of literary excellence, slandered his people...

...Tell me something, do you know Talmud, my educated son...

...One can see the love with which Roth has written this passage, and it is among the gentlest descriptions to be found in any of his novels...

...Sophie Portnoy is a monster, but a brilliant and resourceful one...

...He is a Jew, and he will ask his shiksa girlfriend to convert, somehow, there is no other way...

...Reform Jews make arguments for the complete abolishment of the dietary laws on the grounds that they were originally established to counteract diseases like trichinosis that we no longer have to worry about...

...At the end of The Professor of Desire, David Kepesh, harmless academic but sexual lunatic, finds domestic bliss with a good, solid (and non-Jewish) girl, yet feels his affection growing dim and his desire for other women and adventures rising again, all during a weekend in which his elderly father and his father's friend have come for a visit...

...If Billy Rose laid eyes on him, clowning around in the water like that, he'd be in the Aquacade tomorrow...

...And what about at the pool...

...Tell me, now that you are all finished at fourteen being a Jew, do you know a single thing about the wonderful history and heritage of the saga of your people...

...This letter is written in memory of those who suffered the horror of the Concentration Camps runs some of his correspondence...

...And what they feel-and what Roth feels, and what I feel-is inextricably linked to that one, defining fact...

...Don't make it so that she regrets the day you were born, sonny...

...And from the first day in the sun...

...But young David Kepesh knows what the guests don't...

...Look, you know what you don't find...

...One notices, now, after all the criticisms have been registered and the case against Roth successfully made, that he has, in the past twenty years, contributed a substantial body of work...

...If Nathan does not remit the cash, he says, he will kill Nathan's mother...

...That is all our good Christian friends will see, I guarantee you...

...In Zuckerman Unbound, Nathan's father lies dying in a Miami hospital while Nathan rattles off to him the current conception of the origin of the universe"The universe expanding outward ever since, the galaxies all rushing away, out into space, from the impact of that first big bang"-and leaves his writer son with but one word: "Bastard," he says, and dies...

...Nathan's mother is not the castrating mother of Carnovsky, but is, instead, a nice old Jewish lady...

...Even the reader who knows that the "transformation yet to come" is David Kepesh's Kafkaesque metamorphosis into The Breast (surely the most ill-conceivedrepulsive, to be truthful-thing Roth has ever written) can see here, in this beautiful sentence, a startling compression of David Kepesh and all his fellow travelers in the post-liberated world: Desire and death intermingle, and "love" is nowhere to be seen...

...their only concern, it seems, is with the liberalization of the religion...

...Blumenthal called...

...Ronald...

...And in the "Nathan Zuckerman" novels, he seems to take it for granted that we wish to know all about his first literary success, the night he spent with Bernard Malamud, what he did with the million dollars he earned from Portnoy's Complaint...

...The real question is, Are You Telling the Truth...

...Yet apparently he did not convince himself in the writing of The Ghost Writer, for he has returned to the very same subject, thirteen years after that night with E.I...

...This is, I think, an important consideration...

...So Nathan Zuckerman is cursed by his father, and Philip Roth is cursed by Jews...

...Please bring your mah-jongg tiles to the game tonight...

...From Ronald Nimkin, killed by his mother, to Victor Zuckerman, killed by his son: What is it with these Jews...

...The "Whacking Off' section of that novel, in particular, is a marvel, one of the most unsettling and brilliant passages in modern literature...

...He comes to Lonoff, he says frankly, to find a new "father," one who will not react this way to work he knows to be good and true...

...A's in school," he says, "but in life he's as ignorant as the day he was born...

...Just as much as he respects me, just about as much Suddenly he is sizzling-he turns on me with another new and brilliant thought...

...We may wish to ignore these facts, or to act as though they have no bearing on our lives, but they are ines capable...

...There is a desire to soften restrictions, to soften Judaism itself...

...He is rarely uninteresting-he some times makes disastrous mistakes, like Our Gang and The Breast...

...Herbie's best work is done in private, imitations of a flushing toilet and breaking wind...

...Lonoff, in Zuckerman Unbound...

...Kikes and their love of money...

...Jews ignore the faith more and more...

...And he and David Kepesh and Peter Tarnopol (the hero of My Life as a Man) may masturbate, and fall in love with Gentiles, and may even marry beautiful blondes who will turn their lives into living hell, but still there it is: They are Jews...

...They are also oddly sanguine: One gets the feeling, reading their work, that for many different reasons Jews are better and richer than others...

...This may seem like an extraordinary statement, considering the extravagant praise Roth has received since his debut in print...

...His Jews-the Patimkins of Goodbye Colum bus, the Herzes and Wallachs of Letting Go, the Portnoys, Peter Tarnopol of My Life as a Man, David Kepesh of The Professor of Desire and The Breast, and Nathan Zuckerman of The Ghost Writer and, most recently, Zuckerman Unbound* -are the best portrayed in modern fiction...

...and sometimes goes compietely haywire, as he did in the nnreada k Gxeat Ainii' ci hovel, but...

...And it is an accusation that has hurt and stung Roth...

...And wait till you see the tan on this kid...

...Zuckerman accused the younger Nathan of delivering the Jews into the hands of the anti-Semites...

...And the Patimkins, rich as they are, would not keep so obvious a reminder of their lower-class days in their basement...

...What the hell am I holding these jacks for, will somebody tell me...

...Heedless of Jewish feeling...

...To take that kind of looks, and to be funny, and to go crazy like that with the drums, that to me is something special in the annals of show business...

...The blackmailer is a man with high literary ideals, but he knows where to hit Nathan hardest: "Have a heart, Zuck...

...He is shouting now, and waving his arms, hoping that this will prevent him from breaking into tears...

...Masturbation, for Roth, is not just a triviality, as it has been portrayed by Masters and Johnson and by Shere Hite (in fact, the latter celebrates masturbation as the most satisfying sexual pleasure), but is rather a matter of utmost seriousness, and even as he describes it hilariously he analyzes it gravely...

...What I am trying to say is that Roth deserves attention not because he makes a scene about Jews, nor because he writes about sex and masturbation in a shocking way, but because he is a good writer and a serious man...

...And, sitting on the veranda, the guests wonder whether Herbie's eardrum prob lem, which has conveniently kept him out of World War II, was self-inflicted: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $10.95...

...they would more .llkely have a meat-freezer :filled withh filet-mignon downstairs 14 ':THE #MERICM'4.SPECTA Olt -EP EMaER 1981...

...he has just, at the age of twenty-three, written the best story of his life, ''Higher Education'' (read Goodbye Columbus), to which his father has reacted violently...

...What is rarely, if ever, noted is that Roth writes an English sentence better than almost anyone else alive, and that behind the brilliant comedy lies a serious concern with important matters-and when dealing with important matters, he is never vulgar...

...Yet in these two latest novels he fascinates, partly because of their virtues and partly because one is eager to hear his side of the story...

...How about on the diving board...

...Are we to infer that this is true of Roth's mother as well...

...Nietzsche once said that death is the only real fact we have, but this is too exclusive...

...He was roundly accused of sensationalism at the time of Portnoy 's Complaint, but it was a false and cheap accusation...

...12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 "Please, a kid who dresses like that right down to the key chain, and with a build like that that he works on day and night, plus those drums, you think he gonna do himself serious physical damage just out of spite to the war effort...

...Why is he picking on the Jews...

...He discovers, however, that sacrificing oneself to art is just that: a sacrifice...

...Roth, however, writes about Jews with a nagging and persistent plaint not unlike Freud's about women: "What do Jews want...

...Surely Gentiles masturbate...

...One may prefer the large-hearted humanity of Saul Bellow, but there is no denying Roth his position as one of the foremost of American Jewish writers, and very likely as the foremost American novelist of his generation...

...We return to the old truism: The writer must write about what he knows to be true, and everything else in his life must come after...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 13 The brilliance and dazzle present in all of Roth's work have often been underestimated...

...1 agree, one hundred percent...

...chose proud of their Jewishness see Roth as a vulgarizes who understands Jews only as masturbators obsessed with the consump motion of fruit...

...But still: Why is he picking on the Jews...

...The entertainer, Herbie Bratasky, a handsome young third-rate drummer, is the focus of attention: Our guests appear to be nearly as mesmerized by Herbie's shameless exhibitionism as I am...

...he has complained about it in interviews for many years and has turned to it explicitly in his two latest, nakedly autobiographical novels, The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound...

...or, as the sanctimonious Judge Wapter puts it in The Ghost Writer, "Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels...

...but the jig is up...

...Nathan has just written an outrageous novel called Carnovsky (yes, Portnoy's Complaint), which has, suddenly, made him rich, famous, and even more seriously subject to charges of anti-Semitism...

...He's just got that kind of skin-never burns, only tans...

...For every Sophie Portnoy threatening her sevenyear-old son with a knife when he refuses to eat there must be a Gentile mother doing similar horrible things to her son, mustn't there...

...But there are already tears on his cheeks, and more are on the way from his eyes...

...now Nathan is left with the fear that Carnovsky, that harsh dissection of the Jewish family (and, if we may extend the parallels to Portnoy's Complaint, of the Jewish father as a man literally constipated from humiliations suffered at the hands of the goyim), has been the cause of his father's demise...

...Kepesh's parting words to the reader: But even while I suck in a desperate frenzy at the choicest morsel of her flesh, even as I put all my accumulated happiness, and all my hope, against my fear of transformations yet to come, I wait to hear the most dreadful sound imaginable emerge from the room where Mr...

...she would, more probably, keep her hair grey and dull, in order to make her son feel even more guilty, about her age and oncoming death...

...lam a Jew, the characters in Roth's books cry out, but why...

...Why would I want to do that...

...he does what he does, and he does it well...

...This kid has got skin on him right out of Bible times...

...no Jewish restriction really binds the modern American Jew, but still he wishes for license because he does still, in some way, feel bound...

...Does he respect them...

...Alex rails and rails still more but cannot, in the end, answer that one question: Why did 1 ask her to convert...

...Why is the one thing in the world most hateful to me so important...

...You don't find a kid who is good-looking like this one, who is funny like he is too...

...He is one of those writers who actually writes, unlike many of the grander figures of our day who write one thing and live off of it for years, giving interviews and sitting on boards of foundations and prize committees...

...she replies, and that is John Podhoretz is film critic of The American Spectator...

...But despite the harshness, the nakedness, with which he examines the most uniquely beleagured people who have ever lived, he recognizes the one thing that makes the Jews of the present day still Jews...

...In a wild, beautifully con structed fantasy that, as Pearl K. Bell has said, "trembles on the edge of reality," Nathan decides she is Anne Frank, who having come out of Auschwitz alive, has concealed her identity from the world in order to let her diary serve as the great testimony of the Holocaust...

...Zuckerman Unbound is about a great many things-celebrity, money, and the everpopular conjunction and disjunction of life and art-but again, it is really about Jews, and the Jewish family in particular...

...Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow are better writers, but they are, in a sense, bound to the past and to a language-Yiddish-that has no relevance to authors of the younger generation...

...Haven't you given her enough misery with this book...

...The Jews are not a cause, not an issue: They are a people...

...It is the question Philip Roth has been trying to answer for the last twenty years...

...Who dares to accuse of such unthinking crimes the husband of Anne Frank...

...He makes errors on the way: Sophie Portnoy would not rinse her grey hair with blue dye, nor would the Patimkins of Goodbye Columbus have a refrigerator full of fruit in their basement.'}' When Roth errs like this, he is reaffirming inaccurate and invalid stereotypes, and opens himself to the accusation of antiSemitism...

...Roth knows these people-they are, in fact, most of what he knows-their way of talking, their way of thinking, of treating one another, of eating, of dressing, of decorating...

...Judaism is an "issue" to be "dealt with": The assumption here is that Jewishness requires some sort of Lutheran justification, as though in this day and age there had to be some reason "why" Judaism should still exist...