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 Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: David Mogolov 
Date:   04-09-04 16:29

Ken asked me what my favorite Philip Roth novel is. I thought about it for awhile, and changed my mind several times. Surely I'll change it again after posting this, or based on somebody's brilliant response, but for now, I'm going to argue for The Counterlife.

It had to be a Nathan Zuckerman book, right? Zuckerman's practically the author (I suspect Roth's ceded some important mental real estate to Nathan Zuckerman) of the books he's in; I think of "Zuckerman" before I think of "Roth" when any of the book titles come up in conversation, from "The Ghost Writer" up to "The Human Stain."

The peculiarity of The Counterlife among the Zuckerman novels is the way that Nathan's reimagining of his and Henry's lives so effectively stands in for Roth's reimagining of Nathan's identity time and again. It's as if Roth found the decisions about Zuckerman to difficult to make, and decided to take every road and let Nathan himself solve the problem. In the earlier novels he's in a process of discovery, and in the later, he's reflecting on memories and other peoples' lives, primarily, as opposed to playing a role in the action.

It's this weird middle story, The Counterlife--where Nathan's old enough to have a sense of himself, but not so old that he's backward-looking--where we actually get to see Nathan Zuckerman as a functioning, active adult, confident in his convictions but unsure of how to act on them. And true to form, he acts on them by writing fantasies on his own branching life. The man lives inside of his writing, which goes a long way towards explaining why these later books, the memoirs, are memoirs of other people. He's just paying visits.
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 Re: Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: Ken Gordon, JBooks editor 
Date:   04-09-04 21:47

David:

Thanks. Lots to think about here.

My first thought is that it's difficult to consider "The Counterlife" as its own stand-alone book. To me, the Zuckerman novels are one continuous work--a sprawling Proustian construction--and I get the sense that Roth has always wanted it that way. (I'll be interested to see how Roth and the Library of America handle the Zuckerman tales in their upcoming anthology.) Which makes sense. He is, as we both know, an artist of the highest ambitions.

Thought number two: You point out that in "The Counterlife" Zuckerman is "a functioning, active adult, confident in his convictions." I completely agree with this, and would add that he gets even more interesting in the later books. There is something extremely satisfying in the late-period Zuckermania--"The Human Stain," "I Married A Communist," and "American Pastoral"--because in these Zuckerman discovers that other people can be Extremely Interesting. Coleman Silk. Swede Lvov. Ira Ringold. Nathan gives these folks the time and attention he lavished mainly on himself in the first three books.

The final thought? That "The Counterlife" is special in that it takes some dangerous chances with Roth's realism. (Including killing and then reviving his characters--a trick that would do in many a lesser writer.) In the end, we finish with a palpable feeling of uncertainty, which is, in my book, a good thing.

Of one thing I am certain: I'll have to re-read "The Counterlife" as soon as possible.

Best,


Ken
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 Re: Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: David Mogolov 
Date:   04-12-04 14:48

I think all of the things you have to say about The Counterlife only reinforce my decision.

Thinking about your "thought number two"--do you think that Zuckerman's consideration of Henry and the family in The Counterlife marks that switch in his mind, of starting to pay attention to others the way he'd been so used to thinking about himself? I wonder whether Roth saw this book, the book between the trilogies (excepting the Prague Orgy, which is almost a book 3.5 of the first trilogy), as an opportunity to liberate Zuckerman from what would have some very unbecoming latter-day navel gazing?
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 Re: Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: Ken Gordon, JBooks editor 
Date:   04-13-04 06:41

The one thing we need to remember is that the early Zuckerman books were hardly solipsistic fictions. Think about "The Ghost Writer" and the amount of time Nathan spends imagining the story of, say, Amy Bellette. Zuck--and PR--have long been interested in other people, though perhaps a narrative shift did happen when Roth published "The Counterlife." The formal experiments may well have pushed him to say, "Hey: Why not write a number of Zuckerman books without all the Zuckerman. Make Zuckerman a biographer, a historian!" The great advantage of having Zuckerman act as a novel's emcee is that readers already know so much about Z's own history. We know Zuck, we've seen him think and struggle and laugh, and this informs our understading of people such as Coleman Silk and such subjects as the Vietnam War. In any case, pulling Z. out of the spotlight was a brilliant move, and it gave Roth a reason to keep writing these books. Question is: How many more Zuckerman novels does Roth have in him? Do you think it's possible that there could be another book--hell, another triology--in the series? Or has this bus finally reached the terminal?
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 Re: Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: David Mogolov 
Date:   04-27-04 16:11

>Where can Zuckerman go now? Impotent, incontinent, jaded, an observer, reviving the past because he is looking towards the end...what is left for him to see or do?



I suspect one grand, final Zuckerman novel could still outdo all of the rest. And the more crippled and hopeless Zuckerman becomes, the more new ground there is to cover.

Pure speculation, off the top of my head:
I imagine Zuckerman drifting along between life and death would liberate Philip Roth to do almost any damn thing he wanted to. He could scrap almost any convention, and grab hold of an almost infant incoherence to steer the action of the novel. Zuckerman could be immobile, even. Great novels with dying or somehow immobilzed narrators aren't unprecedented. Nicolson Baker's "Room Temperature" and Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" come to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

I've no doubt that after a few hours sitting at his desk, rumbling around in Zuckerman's mind in such a situation, Roth could fill a notebook with good ideas, if he decides to go that route.
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 Re: Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: Sonja Weingärtner 
Date:   07-01-04 13:51

I had my first real "meeting" with philip roth a few years ago, it was that short story the conversion of the jews; ever since I read it I fell in love with this writer who as I found out later wrote novels that could impress me even more, far more than I thought. . .
My favourite Roth novel which I will continue to read at least 10 times again is my life as a man.Why?
1.the neverending confusion of fiction and reality
2.a man confesses his weakness
3.escape from reality( anytime zuckerman is fed up with his psychopathic wife he escapes into his world, the artist's world by typing on a typing machine
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 Re: Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: Joanna 
Date:   07-13-04 14:51

My favorite Roth novel is "American Pastoral" in which Nathan Zuckerman narrates the story of Swede Levov's life. Not only does Roth--through Zuckerman--tell the captivating story of Swede, but he raises pertinent questions about the reality of the American dream and how Jews fit into that reality. The last lines of the novel always stick with me: "And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?" From the beginning to the end of "American Pastoral," Roth subtly and wittily comments on the state of American society and the role that one's Jewishness may or may not play in his/her life. As I have only read a few of Roth's books, I look forward to reading more Roth in the future.
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 Re: Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: Shalom Freedman 
Date:   07-15-04 16:09

There are many outstanding Philip Roth novels. American Pastoral, The Counterlife are two of my favorites. But there is one work of Philip Roth which is a work of genius, and which will live in my opinion in the tradition of American literature for many generations to come- and that is 'Portnoy's Complaint.'
First of all ,for me it is what 'Gargantua and Pantagruel' is supposed to be , the funniest book ever written. And it is the book more laughed out loud at , than any I can think of.
But it is also a tremendously( I will use Roth's own word) poignant work which really gets to the American Jewish soul in a deeper and truer way than any work I know. In a sense its language is so precise and so evocative of the American Jewish world I know that it all seems to me a kind of poem. There is it is true much I find objectionable and in a way unkind in it. But I believe it to be a truly great book."What a genius he had when he wrote that work."
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 Re: Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: Mark Zanger 
Date:   08-01-04 23:14

I also like the Counterlife for it's exquisite structure. My second choice would be Sabbath's Theatre, because it is so ugly and its structure is as organic as Portnoy's Complaint. I am also very fond of When She Was Good, again a novel with a very Kafka-esque attack concealed by apparently banal (and gentile) subject matter.

--Mark
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 Re: Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: Amy Lourenco 
Date:   10-18-04 15:37

Portnoy's Complaint -- with no hesitation. One of the funniest books I've ever read (again & again)!!
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 Re: Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: Reid Heller 
Date:   10-31-04 18:52

Operation Shylock seems to me to be the beginning of Roth's great political novels. They hit their stride with American Pastoral which I read as one of the great 20th century American novels. It fulfills in one sustained act of imagination all the promise of his early short stories.

But I do not think the standard of the masterpiece is the best way to measure Roth's work. Here is an artist with the tenacity of Zola or Balzac, devoting a lifetime to capturing the hopes, illusions, failings...the fullness of experience of Amercan Jews born in Newark, NJ.

The Plot Against America reveals the origins of the world as Roth and most of us received it...the world of the completely American Jew. This is a beautiful and disturbing book. It calls for a renunciation of some of American Jews' most vital illusions: American exceptionalism, the identity of Judaism with liberalism and America as home. As Roth presents it, the renunciation called for is on the order of Freud's Moses and Monotheism. Roth is in no rush to strip our illusions at once, the novel does its work slowly and thorougly.

I am astounded by the avalanche of unthoughtful reviews that have greeted the Plot. The usual comment one sees is a smug assumption that Roth has used Lindburgh as a cipher for the Bush Administration. (An illusion that no careful reader could ever succumb to) I have not read a comparison yet between Lindburgh and the current democratic hopeful but I'm sure that false comparison is lurking somewhere. Roth is doing something very difficult in this novel and this novel will not give up its insights so easily.

To even begin to get below the surface is to feel profoundly violated and betrayed, to be disturbed and to wonder whether the renunciation was worth it. This is real literature, offering humility and thundering human emotion and politics writ into a family setting... a modern counterpart to biblical narrative with a nod to Greek tragedy.
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 Re: Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: Miriam Moorman 
Date:   11-25-04 08:25

"Portnoy's Complaint" was almost beyond
funny. I couldn't stop laughing long enough to complete the PhD dissertation for which I was using it as the source material. It was, of course, framed by Roth as the content of Portnoy's doomed attempt at a psychoanalytic intervention. The Zuckerman trilogy later matched it for its incredibly insightful humor. Whatever Roth has written, in whatever vein, has been of consistent high quality and originality.

I have yet to be able to decide who is the best among Jewish-American writers, indeed, American writers, he or Saul Bellow.

Miriam Moorman
Los Angeles
mwmoorman@msn.com
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 Re: Favorite Philip Roth novel
Author: Janet Sachs 
Date:   02-17-05 11:58

Without question, "Goodbye, Columbus". One of his first published works that brought him early critical acclaim, the novella shows his innate genius and skill as a writer and storyteller. It also reveals the emerging class struggle in the American Jewish community, when the post-war boom enabled some Jews to realize the American dream. "Goodbye, Columbus" immediately made me a Phillip Roth fan. (Bear in mind I was raised on stories of the "golden days" of the Newark, NJ Jewish community -- my father is from Bayonne, NJ, and he often went to Newark to date and hang out with his friends.)
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