Philip Roth Enters the Canon

By Daniel Schifrin

After fifty years and almost 30 books, Philip Roth could dominate the reading list of a book group for a good three years. And with the appearance this fall of the first two volumes of the Library of America’s definitive collection of Roth’s work, book groups have a good start on the first year of reading.

From the beginning, Roth was notable for his language, ideas and energy, which are in abundant supply in these early books, and which redefined the possibilities of American fiction. Roth's comic genius, his imaginative daring, and his courage in exploring uncomfortable truths made him one of the essential writers of our time.

Roth was also able to re-invent himself several times over his career, and these early books laid the groundwork for his sustained meditation on personal identity in novels such as “The Ghost Writer” and “Operation Shylock,” and his extraordinary analysis of American society in books like “American Pastoral,” “The Human Stain” and last year’s “The Plot Against America,” which was excerpted within these pages.

This first volume of the collected works presents Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, the book that established Roth's reputation on publication in 1959 and for which he won the National Book Award, and his first novel, Letting Go (1962).

The title novella, Goodbye, Columbus, the story of a summer romance between a poor young man from Newark and a rich Radcliffe co-ed, is both a tightly wrought tale of youthful desire and a satiric gem that takes aim at the comfortable affluence of the postwar boom. Here and in the stories that accompany it, including "The Conversion of the Jews" and "Defender of the Faith," Roth depicts Jewish lives in 1950s America with an unflinching sharpness of observation.

In Letting Go, a sprawling novel set largely against the backdrop of Chicago in the 1950s, Roth portrays the moral dilemmas of young people cast precipitously into adulthood, and in the process describes a skein of social and family responsibilities as they are brought into focus by issues of marriage, abortion, adoption, friendship, and career. The novel's expansiveness provides a wide scope for Roth's gift for vivid characterization, and in his protagonist Gabe Wallach he creates a nuanced portrait of a responsive young academic whose sense of morality draws him into the ordeals of others with unforeseen consequences.

When She Was Good (1967) is the trenchant portrait of Lucy Nelson, a young midwestern woman whose perception of her own suffering turns her into a ferocious force. A small-town 1940s America of restrictive social pressures and foreclosed opportunities provides the novel's background.

The publication of the hilarious Portnoy's Complaint (1969) was a cultural event that turned Roth into a reluctant celebrity. The confession of a bewildered psychoanalytic patient thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality yet held back by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood, Portnoy unleashed Roth's comic virtuosity and opened new avenues for American fiction.

In Our Gang (1971), Roth effects a savage takedown of the administration of Richard Nixon (who figures here as Trick E. Dixon). Written before the revelations of the Watergate scandal, Our Gang continues to resonate as a broad and outraged response to the clownish hypocrisy and moral theatrics of the American political scene.

The Kafkaesque excursion The Breast (1972) introduces David Kepesh in the first volume of a trilogy that continues with The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Dying Animal (2001). The Breast prompted Cynthia Ozick to remark, "One knows when one is reading something that will permanently enter the culture."

For more information, please visit www.jewishculture.org, or www.loa.org