Life & Background
Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933 to second-generation Jewish American parents, and the city remained his territory for fifty years. He studied at Bucknell and Chicago, and won the National Book Award at twenty-six for Goodbye, Columbus, which also brought accusations of antisemitism from rabbis who objected to his portrayal of Jewish Americans — a charge that followed him for decades. Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 made him famous and notorious at once. He created the recurring alter egos Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh, and a character named Philip Roth, blurring the boundary deliberately. A late run of major novels in the 1990s brought the Pulitzer for American Pastoral. He announced his retirement from writing in 2012 and died in 2018.
American Pastoral
Nathan Zuckerman reconstructs the life of Seymour Levov, the Swede — a Newark schoolboy athlete of legendary poise who marries a former Miss New Jersey, takes over his father's glove factory, and buys a stone house in the countryside, achieving the assimilated American life his immigrant grandparents worked for. In 1968 his sixteen-year-old daughter Merry, who stammers and rages against the Vietnam War, plants a bomb in the local post office and kills a doctor collecting his mail. She disappears. The Swede spends years searching, and the book follows his attempt to understand what happened, through a marriage that disintegrates, a mistress, and eventually a meeting with his daughter in a squalid room in Newark, where she has become a Jain who will not harm any organism and no longer washes.
The novel's frame matters: Zuckerman admits he is inventing the Swede's inner life from almost nothing, so the book is explicitly a novelist's attempt to imagine another person, and its recurring claim is that getting people wrong is what living amounts to. The pastoral of the title is the assimilationist American dream, and the counterpastoral is the country turning on itself in the 1960s. Roth's late style — long, propulsive, argumentative sentences, close third person shading into rant — is at full strength here. Feminist criticism has consistently challenged his portrayal of women, and the argument over whether his misogyny is a subject or a symptom is a standard examination question.
Why Roth Matters
Roth is central to the postwar American novel and to Jewish American writing alongside Bellow and Malamud, and the American Trilogy — American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain — is the major fictional treatment of postwar American political life. His metafictional games with Zuckerman and with a character called Philip Roth make him important to discussions of autofiction long before the term was current. He won nearly every American literary prize and, contentiously, never the Nobel.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Goodbye, Columbus1959
- Portnoy's Complaint1969
- The Ghost Writer1979
- The Counterlife1986
- Operation Shylock1993
- American Pastoral1997
- The Human Stain2000
- The Plot Against America2004