Roth reconsidered.(Philip Roth)(Critical Essay)

To be published by the Library of America officially establishes an author as a classic: it is an honor almost akin to winning the Nobel Prize. Of eighty-seven authors currently published in the Library of America series, all but one is dead. That one is Philip Roth. This fact alone says a great deal about Roth's place in the American pleiade.

The first two of a projected eight volumes of Roth's works have just appeared, the first containing Goodbye, Columbus, five short stories, and Letting Go, and the second, When She Was Good, Portnoy's Complaint, Our Gang, and The Breast. (1) These various pieces of fiction date from 1958, when Roth was twenty-five years old, until 1972, when he was still under forty--not juvenilia, therefore, but still the work of a young man. Major novels like Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, and The Plot Against America were still far in the future.

One notices in many Library of America editions that either a certain amount of dross has to be included for the whole to qualify as a real "Collected Works," or else the editors have to omit the really second-rate stuff, as was done rather ruthlessly in the case of James Baldwin. This has not been necessary with Roth. On the contrary: the general high level of all the work is startling. A lot of us read these books in early youth, especially Portnoy's Complaint, Roth's great succes de scandale, and remember them with enormous pleasure, but so many books that once attracted readers with their modernity, their shock power, or their perfect pitch for the telling details of their particular time date all too easily. But looking back at Roth's books from this very different historical moment one finds that all of them, even those most rooted in the events of their time, work at least as well now as they ever did.

Goodbye, Columbus, a novella of a mere hundred pages, is as perfect in its way as Daisy Miller or The Great Gatsby. In theme it looks directly back to Gatsby and, further, to Great Expectations: Roth, who studied English at the University of Chicago graduate school, has always been very conscious of literary history and form and fictional tradition. The envious, striving outsider is a classic protagonist, but Roth made this stock character memorable by localizing him within a place and social milieu that were still fairly exotic in serious fiction. The grubby Newark where Neil Klugman's aunt and uncle live and toil in immigrant ignominy, the promised land of Short Hills, where the Patimkins live out a poor man's fantasy of luxury and bounty: appealing to our senses of taste and smell as well as sight and hearing, Roth made both places perfectly immediate and true.

 
   Once I'd driven out of Newark, past Irvington 
   and the packed-in tangle of railroad crossings, 
   switchmen shacks, lumberyards, Dairy 
   Queens, and used-car lots, the night grew 
   cooler. It was, in fact, as though the hundred 
   and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude 
   above Newark brought one closer to heaven, 
   for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and 
   rounder, and soon I was driving past long 
   lawns which seemed to be twirling water on 
   themselves, and past houses where no one sat 
   on stoops, where lights were on but no windows 
   open, for those inside, refusing to share 
   the very texture of life with those of us outside, 
   regulated with a dial the amounts of moisture 
   that were allowed access to their skin.... I 
   thought of my Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max 
   sharing a Mounds bar in the cindery darkness 
   of their alley, on beach chairs, each cool breeze 
   sweet to them as the promise of afterlife, and 
   after a while I rolled onto the gravel roads of 
   the small park where Brenda was playing tennis. 
   Inside my glove compartment it was as 
   though the map of The City Streets of Newark 
   had metamorphosed into crickets, for those 
   mile-long tarry streets did not exist for me any 
   longer, and the night noises sounded loud as 
   the blood whacking at my temples. 

What a gift! This is prose as evocative as a Chopin nocturne. Neil doesn't just see the Patimkins' wealth; he feels it through every pore. His description of their refrigerator--not the modern kitchen one, but the old one they keep in the basement--conveys a beatific vision of a long-lost but instantly recognized Garden of Eden.

 
   I opened the door of the old refrigerator; it 
   was not empty. No longer did it hold butter, 
   eggs, herring in cream sauce, ginger ale, tuna 
   fish salad, an occasional corsage--rather it was 
   heaped with fruit, shelves swelled with it, 
   every color, every texture, and hidden within, 
   every kind of pit. There were greengage 
   plums, black plums, red plums, apricots, nectarines, 
   peaches, long horns of grapes, black, 
   yellow, red, and cherries, cherries flowing out 
   of boxes and staining everything scarlet. And 
   there were melons--cantaloupes and honeydews--and 
   on the top shelf, half of a huge 
   watermelon, a thin sheet of wax paper clinging 
   to its bare red face like a wet lip. Oh 
   Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and 
   sporting goods dropped from their trees!