Philip Roth sparked widespread notoriety with his novel of lust-ridden sexual frustration, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)—and complaint was the operative word. Early on, biographer Ira Nadel quotes Roth on Portnoy: he wasn’t a character, the novelist explained, “he was an explosion, and I wasn’t finished exploding…”
Roth was a writer when writers—think of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolf—walked on the same plateau as rock stars. They were the Mick Jaggers and Pete Townsends of the written word. Nowadays, even leading writers such as Jonathan Franzen resemble stars on the indie circuit playing to small halls. In his last years, Roth’s novels were greeted by readers the way fans greet the late work of Elvis Costello, worth a look but somehow overshadowed by a colorful and contentious past.
Nadel isn’t a novice biographer. His previous subjects include Leonard Cohen and David Mamet, but he finds Roth an especially hard case. Probably this begins with Roth’s contempt for biographers (he makes fun of them in several novels) and continues with his belief that our understanding of any life can never be more than a guess and his own determination to compartmentalize his private person from his public persona—even as one bled into the other.
Roth would probably complain, perhaps explode, had he lived to read Nadel’s biography. For the rest of us, A Counterlife provides a plausible picture. Roth was part of a generation of angry Jewish writers emerging after World War II. As American anti-Semitism began to loosen, they were in revolt against their hardworking, allegedly complacent parents; they were towering egos climbing the Parnassus of American culture—and changing the view from the top with their perspectives.
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On Roth’s personal life with its fraught relations with many women, Nadel offers an insight: Roth feared failure and preempted it by breaking with women before they broke with him. Nadel also makes some interesting observations about Roth’s slender final novels, describing their plainspoken minimalism as reflecting “the Jersey style” (of the novelist’s Newark upbringing), returning to the past while increasingly conscious that death awaited. Toward the end, Roth retired, put his affairs in order and waited. The explosions were long past and the complaints of those final novels were at low volume.
