Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth

Abstract

Safer focuses on comedy and satire in Roth’s later novels, by which she means 90s and later – The Counterlife is not actually a later novel according to her, it’s one of the “postmodern works” before American Pastoral (2). She emphasizes Roth as a Jewish author, one for whom Jewishness is “a pervasive theme” (6), and discusses his roots in/connections to Jewish comedy (the Marx Brothers, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen; the figure of the schlemiel). Yet weirdly she seems to suggest that Jewishness is both highly significant in Roth’s life and something that he had to “transcend” to attain more universal ideas (15). There is a persistent framing of Jewishness as something small, limited, and even provincial, as though writing about Jews cannot also be a way of writing about the world. I don’t understand this, and it seems like a major limitation of the text, which is not the most carefully written (she talks about Roth’s “own people” (14) at one point, instead of just saying the ethnoreligious group of which he is a part, or something more neutral like that). She goes to pains at one point to point out that the negative traits of Roth’s characters are not because of their Jewishness, but merely expressed in the particular Jewish ways; this is in large part I think a defense of Roth as not anti-semitic, a move she feels the need to make. Chapters on Postmodernist novels (Counterlife, Ghost Writer), Operation Shylock (the Double, the Comic, the Quest for Identity), Sabbath’s Theater (“Raunchy? Picaresque? Heroic”), American Pastoral (“The Tragicomic Fall of Newark and the House of Levov”), I Married A Communist (“A Grave Misfortune Replete with Farce”), The Human Stain (“Comic Irony and the Lives of Coleman Silk”), The Dying Animal (“Pleasure is Our Subject”), The Plot Against America (“Paranoia or Possibility?”), and a conclusion on “The Farcical Edge of Suffering.” Not hugely useful but good context, maybe even a straw man for my discussion of Roth’s exploration of Jewishness as non-provincial, as major in its minorness...Stuff on incongruity, which I may relate to perversion.