Roth, Philip
Identification American author
Born March 19, 1933; Newark, New Jersey
During the 1990’s, Roth produced five novels and one au-
tobiographical volume about his relationship with his fa-
ther. Two of the novels became part of his American trilogy,
hailed as trenchant commentar y on American life.
Philip Roth’s output of books during the 1990’s was
great. Roth’s first work of the decade,Deception: A
Novel(1990), blurs the boundary between truth and
fiction. As such, it fits in with many postmodernist
works in which “truth” itself is regarded as a kind of
fiction. His second,Patrimony: A True Stor y(1991),
tells the story of his father’s death. He wrote it, in part,
to dispel the idea that Roth’s relationship to his father
was the same as that of Roth’s frequent narrator, Na-
than Zuckerman, who is estranged from his family as
a result of the things he puts in his novels. The third,
Operation Shylock: A Confession(1993), treats the idea
of doubles, one of whom is a man in Israel who calls
himself Philip Roth, claims to be the novelist, and
works toward a plan that will send the Jews from Israel
back to the European countries from which they
came. This plan, the fictional Roth says, is the only
way to save the lives of Israel’s Jews. The next book,
Sabbath’s Theater(1995), treats Mickey Sabbath, whose
literal theater involves hand puppets but whose meta-
phoric theater consists of himself and the people with
whom he interacts. Sabbath is a lecherous character
many readers find despicable.
The final two works of the decade,American Pasto-
ral(1997) andI Married a Communist(1998), along
with The Human Stain (2000), constitute Roth’s
American trilogy. In the first, he creates Seymour
“Swede” Levov, a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jew from
Newark, a former high school football hero, who
marries an Irish Catholic who is a former Miss New
Jersey. He moves to the country and tries to blend
into the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant world that
surrounds him, but his life falls apart when his
daughter, Merry, protesting the war in Vietnam, sets
off a bomb in the local post office. The explosion
kills a man, and Merry goes underground.
I Married a Communisttreats the era of Senator Jo-
seph McCarthy, in which, as Roth depicts it, the idea
of guilt by association replaced ideas of freedom and
justice in America. Nathan Zuckerman, the narra-
tor, sees his friend Ira Ringold, known to the radio
audience as “Iron Rinn,” destroyed by innuendo
rather than any kind of judicial proceedings.
Ringold loses his radio job and his influence because
of the assertion—which is, incidentally, correct—
that he is a communist.
Impact Roth influenced a generation of Jewish
American authors and Jewish Americans to reevalu-
ate their positions in America and their ability to
achieve the American Dream. He also showed that as
a mature writer, he continued to write novels consid-
ered sensitive and powerful and involving fresh
ideas.
Further Reading
Posnock, Ross.Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Im-
maturity.Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2006.
Safer, Elaine B.Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of
Philip Roth. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2006.
Richard TuerkThe Nineties in America Roth, Philip 729
Philip Roth.(©Nancy Crampton)