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Ross Posnock is Professor of English at Columbia University, where he also teaches American Studies. His books include The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity; Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual; and The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison.

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"Ross Posnock's meditation upon Philip Roth is the best literary criticism yet afforded to our foremost novelist since Faulkner. Roth emerges from this study as a major American novelist in a literary tradition that goes back to Emerson and Henry James. Posnock clearly defines the writer whose heartening motto is: 'We are here to be insulted.' One of Roth's favorite adages is Heine's: 'There is a God and his name is Aristophanes.'"--Harold Bloom, literary critic

"Far and away the most astute and nuanced account we have or likely to have for many years to come, of Roth's emergence as an unrivalled master of irony and irreverence--a rhapsodic genius most alive when provoking moralists and liberationists alike. No critic has made a better case for Roth's place among the classic writers of the nation and the world."--Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles

"Ross Posnock takes a familiar figure, on whom rivers of ink have been spilt, and completely reorients the critical context for an understanding of his work. His book gives us a powerful and original perspective on Roth, placing him in the mainstream of American literature from Emerson and Whitman to Ellison. Rightly emphasizing his later books, Posnock sees him as an antinomian writer, ruthless, outrageous, mind-bendingly complex yet deeply consistent."--Morris Dickstein, Graduate Center of the City University of New York

"Philip Roth is arguably one of the two or three most important writers in America today, and Ross Posnock's book is a superlative achievement fully worthy of its subject. It is a masterful work of literary and cultural criticism. I loved reading it, and will return to it frequently for exhilaration and enlightenment. I have not the slightest doubt that many other readers will share my enthusiasm."--Michael Gilmore, Brandeis University

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Philip Roth's Rude Truth

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

ROTH ANTAGONISTES

Decrying the "sanitized" eulogy he has just heard delivered over the coffin of his friend the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, who has suddenly died during heart surgery, an unidentified mourner, bearded and middle-aged, gives an impromptu countereulogy on the sidewalk:

He made it easy for them. Just went in there and died. This is a death we can all feel good about. Not like cancer.... The cancer deaths are horrifying. That's what I would have figured him for. Wouldn't you? Where was the rawness and the mess? Where was the embarrassment and the shame? Shame in this guy operated always. Here is a writer who broke taboos, fucked around, indiscreet, stepped outside that stuff deliberately, and they bury him like Neil Simon-Simonize our filthy, self-afflicted Zuck! Hegel's unhappy consciousness out under the guise of sentiment and love! This unsatisfiable, suspect, quarrelsome novelist, this ego driven to its furthest extremes, ups and presents them with a palatable death-and the feeling police, the grammar police, they give him a palatable funeral with all the horseshit and the mythmaking! ... I can't get over it. He's not even going to rot in the ground, this guy who was made for it. This insidious, unregenerate defiler, this irritant in the Jewish bloodstream, making people uncomfortable and angry by looking with a mirror up his own asshole, really despised by a lot of smart people, offensive to every possible lobby, and they put him away, decontaminated, deloused-suddenly he's Abe Lincoln and Chaim Weizmann in one! Could this be what he wanted, this kosherization, this stenchlessness? I really had him down for cancer, the works. (C 217-19)

Reading this, we know where we are: the outrage, wit, excess, cadence, and above all the voice-the careening, over-the-top verbal intoxication that takes on a lyric life of its own, one of near giddy pleasure in its enraged vulgar onslaught; we are in a Philip Roth novel, in this case The Counterlife. Verbal energy overturns boundaries as Neil Simon consorts with Hegel, Zuckerman invades the collective body-"an irritant in the Jewish bloodstream"-while turning his own inside out-"looking with a mirror up his own asshole"-and words are set in motion: the bland laugh machine Neil Simon morphs into a verb-"Simonize"- that has the impossible task to polish and domesticate "our filthy, self-afflicted Zuck," Nathan's last name now a pungent monosyllable.

If the voice can be torrential and perfervid, it can also, even in its excess, be spare. Here is a vintage moment of the latter mode, a small aria to a man whom Roth calls "my kind of Jew": "Worldly negativity. Seductive verbosity. Intellectual venery. The hatred. The lying. The distrust. The this-worldliness. The truthfulness. The intelligence. The malice. The comedy. The endurance. The acting. The injury. The impairment" (OS 394). The voice is by now unmistakable, as indelible as Hemingway's or Faulkner's.

I have quoted the countereulogy for the pleasure of hearing Roth, but also because it can serve as his miniature self-portrait-albeit an inflamed and burlesqued one-which makes immediately vivid his investment in provoking genteel sensibilities, in embodying the unpalatable. Roth's infamous mocking of bourgeois pieties is crucial to our sense of his literary identity and presence in contemporary culture. In fact, this is to say hardly more than that he is a modern writer; pater le bourgeois is modernism's reflex. Yet who has made it so fertile a subject, a source of literary history, of comedy and pathos, who has made it more his own than American literature's bad boy? Portnoy's Complaint was the first novel to show a Jew "going wild in public"-"the last thing in the world a Jew is supposed to do"-and the sheer gusto of Roth's portrait of a "'cunt crazy' masturbator of the respectable classes" caused a publishing sensation in 1969, and helped define the era's raucous impiety (RMO 258, 256). Thanks to its assault on adulthood and restraint, the novel made the words Roth and immaturity seem a natural pairing. But the immaturity of Portnoy's Complaint-exorbitant, raw, regressive-is only one mode of immaturity, whose subtler incarnations have engaged not only Philip Roth but any number of writers, thinkers, and painters as they all explore less defended ways of being in the world.

As my preface suggests, Milan Kundera is one of Roth's chief interlocutors in this book, one of the figures whom I set in conversation with a novelist whose cosmopolitanism has for too long been hidden under the familiar rubric of Jewish American. Early on, conventional wisdom cast Roth in "the role of the rebellious Jewish son" and junior partner, born in Newark in 1933, of the firm Salinger, Bellow, Mailer, and Malamud (Wisse 317). While this grouping is more than the "journalistic clich almost wholly devoid of content" Roth dismissed in 1981 (RMO 104), it has by now outlived its initial usefulness. For one thing, Roth's near half-century career of remarkable, indeed relentless, productivity-since 1959 twenty-two works of fiction and five of nonfiction-has left such early and parochial rubrics in the dustbin of literary history. And he has gone far from home (if only to return in The Plot Against America, which seven-year-old Philip Roth narrates). For thirteen years Roth lived in London half the year; for five years in the seventies he was a regular visitor to Prague, where he "took a little crash course in political repression," became close with several writers, including Kundera, and was pivotal in publishing the English translations of some of the leading works of postwar Eastern European literature (RMO 140). Roth's own books have a large international audience (they have been translated into over thirty languages, and in fall 2004 two were best sellers in France). All of these experiences, including his permanent return to the United States in 1989, which renewed his sense of the country and became a catalyst for his American trilogy (1997-2000), have significantly enlarged and deepened his art.

Roth's cosmopolitanism has created a body of work that is best understood in an international context-American, European, and Eastern European. The main effort of this book is to construct these overlapping frames of reference, using them as a resource for literary criticism of the fiction, and making vivid Roth's creative engagement with a rich lineage of intellectual history. Threading together my multiple contexts is the subject of immaturity. As a fertile homegrown resistance to the renunciations required by adulthood, immaturity began to appear as such in the American renaissance of the mid-nineteenth century as part of romanticism's celebration of the child and of spontaneity. This open, unguarded sensibility, earlier discounted by Enlightenment scientism and rationalism but in touch with Renaissance humanism, would come to inspire one current of international modernism, including the work of a number of European and Eastern European novelists and thinkers. While the separate branches of this romantic and modernist lineage are well known, their convergence upon the subject of immaturity and in the work of a single capacious novelist remains to be explored.

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