Wrong about Roth

"Excuse me," he said, "is your name Peter Tarnopol by any chance, sir?" I colored a little. "It is." "The novelist?" I nodded my head, and then he turned a very rich red himself. Uncertain clearly as to what to say next, he suddenly blurted, "I mean -- what ever happened to you?" I shrugged. "I don't know," I told him, "I'm waiting to find out myself."

Philip Roth, My Life as a Man

Philip Roth

Philip Roth, who died last week at 85, had a reputation for writing autobiographical novels. Usually his protagonist was Nathan Zuckerman, but in My Life as a Man (1974) his main character was a man named Peter Tarnopol, a novelist struggling to recover from the emasculating effects of his marriage to and divorce from Maureen. Roth's own first marriage, to Margaret Williams, ended in 1963. (Roth wrote similarly about his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, in I Married a Communist.) There was, for him, an unusual five-year gap between Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967), suggesting that after his first marriage ended he really was "waiting to find out" what had happened to him and where he was going as a writer.

Roth wasn't the only one with doubts about Roth. Following the publication of Roth's first book Goodbye, Columbus, a collection of short stories, in 1959, literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote that "his book leaves me worried about his future. For he has put so much of himself into being clear, decisive, straight, his stories are consciously so brave, that I worry whether he hasn't worked himself too neatly into a corner."

But Roth continued to "put so much of himself" into his work and produced book after book, being awarded several prestigious literary awards in the process. These awards included a Pulitzer, two National Book awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner awards, the Franz Kafka Prize and others.

I confess I never warmed to Philip Roth, liking My Life as a Man the best of the few I've read. His prose, in small doses, wowed me, but after a while it seemed more like showing off than meaningful literature. But, like Alfred Kazin and Roth himself at one stage of his career, I may have been wrong.