Ira Nadel's Reading List

"Portnoy’s Complaint reflects Roth’s engagement with psychotherapy during the mid-sixties and the breakup of his first marriage. Roth discovered that he could use his struggle for self-understanding as the subject matter of a novel entwined with satire. It was a literary breakthrough. In the 1960s, a lot of novels dealt with psychoanalysis but what Roth linked it to was outrageous comedy. Roth was also ready to knock down the door of gentility in American literature . Masturbation was not written about during the postwar period and yet, there it was on the page. Reviews said, ‘this is so outrageous, this is so obscene that you have to read it to believe it.’ And everybody wanted to read it. So, Portnoy’s Complaint was a breakout book. It made him a great literary success and financially secure but, at the same time, it was a burden. He became so famous that people would yell at him on the streets of New York . He couldn’t escape being the Philip Roth of Portnoy’s Complaint . He turned to less intimate, shorter work—like Our Gang , the satire of Nixon—before he regained his footing as a writer. Philip Roth put his private life on the page. He changed the names of some characters, and sometimes he didn’t. In The Plot Against America , the young boy telling the story is named Philip and the parents are called Herman and Bess, the name of Roth’s parents. Roth looked in the mirror. He often didn’t like what he saw there, but he wrote about it. He confronted it; he didn’t disguise it and he didn’t hide from it. Throughout his life, he drew from who he was at different stages of his emotional, psychological, and sexual development. Once he wrote Portnoy’s Complaint , he wasn’t afraid of who he was. He wasn’t afraid of naked truths, so he would write about American history and all its contradictions. He would write about political correctness in The Human Stain and a possible Nazi takeover of America and threats to American Jewish life in The Plot Against America . He took on what was uncomfortable."

"The Ghost Writer is a wonderful book for many reasons. It’s about big issues—about vocation, about literature and about the Holocaust. It’s sophisticated with overtones of Henry James , Chekhov , and Turgenev . It explores the nature of emotional relationships, here between the aging novelist E.I. Lonoff and his wife, Hope. It explores history through the character of Amy Bellette, who may, according to the narrator Zuckerman, be Anne Frank. Portnoy’s Complaint , 1969, was over-the-top. But by The Ghost Writer , 1979, he was more restrained. Roth wrote 31 books, but The Ghost Writer is the one that is most carefully structured. Roth gets the mechanics of storytelling and the tone right. He had a great editor, Veronica Geng, who was at The New Yorker ; she polished it with him. Roth broadened his perspective. His relationship with Claire Bloom, the English actress, led to him regularly spending six months of the year in London with her, where he met many new voices: Edna O’Brien, Primo Levi, Harold Pinter, Michael Herr, and the American painter R.B. Kitaj. Saul Bellow, whom he first encountered as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was an early influence but in the seventies and after, it was Milan Kundera, Aharon Appelfeld, and others. He needed to get beyond Bellow and that’s what Europe helped him do. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He also developed important connections with a whole series of other writers in the European phase of his career. Whereas American writers only had to worry about time, money and materials, these writers—whether in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary or later, in Russia—wrote under dire circumstances. In his wonderful collection, Shop Talk , Roth interviewed a whole series of non-American writers. Learning about the lives of these writers took Roth far from Newark. It went beyond his Jersey style."

"The Counterlife provides several alternative perspectives. The novel’s conflicting points of view take you out of your comfort zone, to use the cliché. As I developed in my account of Roth, there is a counterlife to the public Phillip Roth, and it’s often driven by anger. Roth wrote in The Counterlife, “[p]eople are unjust to anger, it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.” But Roth was not that happy and it’s very difficult to find a happy character in his work. Unhappiness is what compels his characters to act, to write, to love, to think and to change. I subtitle my account The Counterlife because it goes beyond the glossy image of Roth presented in Vanity Fair and the happy home images in Architectural Digest . That’s only half his story. I wanted to tell the other part. Roth created a moat around himself, a self-protective wall. I wasn’t going to dismantle the wall, but I wanted to peek over it. This is where archives come in, interviewing people, and thinking about how and why he wrote in his special way."

"It’s Roth most melodramatic novel, written with flamboyance. I like I Married a Communist a great deal because of its energy. Every page has a revelation. It is a captivating book. It’s a novel about politics. The main character in the novel is Ira Ringold. Ira’s brother Murray is a teacher, who’s based on an actual teacher named Robert Lowenstein that Roth had in high school, and what he went through when he was accused during the McCarthy era. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In I Married a Communist, the characters confront constant challenges to their identity. There is the constant theme of impersonation. Ira begins his career imitating Abraham Lincoln. He gives great performances of the Gettysburg Address, which leads to a radio career which leads to his relationship with a woman who herself impersonates someone else. It’s also a novel about acting. Ringold’s love interest is a Jewish woman from Brooklyn, an actress known by the name Eve Frame, who is actually Chava Fromkin. It’s a novel about uncovering who people really are and showing that you cannot hide from who you really are. Impersonation never really succeeds. And we have to say that I Married a Communist was one way Roth got back at Claire Bloom. She had recently published Leaving a Doll’s House , a one-sided account of her relationship with Roth, which infuriated him. So, he creates an actress prone to hysterics and deception. In his mind, she deserved it! It is a tangled topic. People say that even though he represented women as sexual objects and misrepresented or mistreated women, he had mutual relationships with many women in his real life. But critiques of Roth’s representation of women are largely correct. His treatment of women in his work is generally unsympathetic. It is focused on the physical and sexual. Naturally, people react strongly to it—not just in today’s climate, but even when these books were first published. It’s a question, I suppose, of how harmful it is and whether it is enough to undermine Roth’s strengths as a writer unafraid of addressing contemporary problems. “One of his editors told me that he rarely earned back his advances” There are many Roths. There is the misogynistic Roth and then there is the lyrical Roth. Roth isn’t thought of as a lyrical writer because few pay attention to his writing about nature. He loved nature and spent a lot of his life in the countryside: see the final page of The Human Stain , a marvelous piece of writing. This is another aspect of Roth. It’s hard to give up on a writer with this multiplicity. Sabbath’s Theater stands alongside Portnoy’s Complaint as one of Roth’s most controversial books. The protagonist, to be blunt, is a ‘son of a bitch.’ Yet Roth told David Remnick he felt the freest and happiest as an author when writing Sabbath’s Theater because he could let go again. He’s back in the world of Portnoy’s Complaint , but now with a sixty-something protagonist who is almost unlikeable. Mickey Sabbath’s body is giving out. He’s unpleasant. He’s overweight. But he has an insatiable desire and appetite for physicality, even though death is catching up to him. Yet, in Sabbath’s Theater, there’s a marvelous lyrical moment at the end. Sabbath is on the shore in Roth’s native New Jersey, wrapped in an American flag that was given to his mother when his brother died in World War II. That ending is equal to Fitzgerald’s end for The Great Gatsby . It’s a lyrical moment given to a revolting main character. Attention. Offending is a way to avoid being ignored. He was determined to make others listen to what he had to say. And he found much to offend him almost every day. Measured by sales? His two bestsellers were Portnoy’s Complaint and The Plot Against America . Other books got a tremendous amount of press, but one of his editors told me that he rarely earned back his advances. I don’t think that was his goal. I think his goal was to write about issues and circumstances that upset him. The ideas of political correctness, for example."

"This book emanated out of the era when Washington was embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton scandal. Roth was a great enemy of political correctness. He was particularly upset about the changes underway in university life. He always oriented himself around universities. He taught at a long list of universities, including Iowa, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Hunter. He’s buried at Bard. He loved the university but hated any restrictions on its freedoms. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The Human Stain is based on actual experience. A close friend of Roth’s, who was a very distinguished professor of sociology at Princeton, said something that resulted in his ruination. To see ‘cancel culture’—to use today’s phrase—inhibit university life and limit the expression of ideas that we may not want to hear was, to Roth, an anathema. The Plot Against America is about how easily American history can be rewritten. It’s a vivid book. The characters are very bold, but they are based on actual historical figures. It’s about what would’ve happened if someone sympathetic to Hitler had been elected president. It’s part of what I once called, in an essay, “The American Roth.” Roth has, almost from the beginning, written about American values. Another way of looking at Goodbye Columbus is as an account of American values. The Plot Against America shows American values very susceptible to corruption. It’s about how democracy and freedom are always threatened. Roth’s treatment of history could be a topic for another hour. We talked about language and Roth, psychology and Roth, women and Roth and the lyrical Roth. There are multiple Roths. That is why Roth is a writer that we will continue to read and talk about continuously."