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The rest is Commentary...
Every month, Commentary explores a key Jewish thinker or writer, with a brief biography, an introduction to their major works, and suggestions for further reading. Enjoy!
Author of the Month for October
| Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, the son of American-born parents and the grandson of European Jews who were part of the nineteenth-century wave of immigration to the United States. he is perhaps the most radical and provocative living Jewish writer. Shock, outrage and a biting intelligence are his hallmarks. Fellow authors regard him with awe. According to Linda Grant, 'He is without doubt the greatest novelist writing in English today'. He has survived two marriages, a nervous breakdown, and open heart surgery. Now, in his seventies, Roth seems to only just be hitting his stride. |
Philip Roth |
Essential Reading
|
|
The Plot
Against America 'He's picking up on the undercurrents that are abroad right now.'
|
On 7 October, Roth unveils his 26th, and perhaps most audacious, novel,
The Plot Against America. Set in the early 1940s, Roth creates an
alternative history, narrated by his own seven year old self:
Charles Lindbergh, the aviation hero and Nazi sympathiser, defeats Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide to become US president.
He keeps America out of the war and undertakes a policy of Jewish resettlement.
Through the changed lives of his own parents and their friends in Newark,
Roth gives a shattering and pertinent picture of America's slide to the
right, and a disturbing depiction of the cultural and political climate in
which anti-semitism thrives.
 |
"Brilliantly written...angry, grieving, witty, acute...compellingly and convincingly rendered" -- Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times
|
A classic depiction of coming of age in America, the clash of generations, and the birth of a new fundamentalism, becoming more timely and prescient with the years. Seymour Levov, a devoted family man and inheritor of his father's factory, comes of age in thriving post-war America. His daughter Merry is the apple of his eye until America begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s, and Merry grows up to be a terrorist bent on destroying her father's paradise.
 |
The
Human Stain "One of his very best. There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief.'
|
Coleman Silk has a secret. But it’s not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with a woman half his age. And it’s not the secret of his alleged racism, which provoked the college witchhunt that cost him his job. Coleman’s secret is deeper, and lies at the very core of who he is, and he has kept it hidden from everyone for fifty years. Set in 1998, with the backdrop of the impeachment of a president, The Human Stain shows us an America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions result in public denunciations and houndings, and where innocence is not always a good enough excuse.
 |
Operation
Shylock "the Great American Jewish Novel"
|
Roth's agonized engagement with his Jewish identity is as powerful as ever, but given breadth in this novel by an examination of the conflicts between Jews and Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories which is by turns tragic and bitterly comic. The two leading characters of this novel are the novelist Philip Roth and the crazed Jewish activist...Philip Roth! The book begins with Roth confronting his double, an impostor whose self-appointed task is to lead the Jews not into, but out of Israel, and back to Europe.
 |
Portnoy's
Complaint "Deliciously funny...absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious... a brilliantly vivid reading
experience."
|
The book that launched a thousand letters of complaint. The book that brought Roth unwanted fame, if not notoriety. He creates a wildly comic representation of the middle-class New York Jewish world, through his portrait of the deranged, hallucinating Alexander Portnoy, whose possessive mother makes him so guilty and insecure that he can seek relief only in elaborate masturbation and sex with forbidden shiksas. Read this and you'll never look at liver in the same way again.
Previous
Authors of the Month
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Also
Recommended:
Saul Bellow
Henry Roth
John Updike
