Philip Roth is a singular figure in recent American fiction: he is a social realist who adamantly refuses to withdraw from the field, even though he sees around him no smiling aspects of American life. Taking as his domain the recognizable present, Roth has been the most prolific—and the most controversial—writer in America in the last decade and a half. His immense popularity in the universities and the marketplace has raised appreciative eyebrows and elicited cries of outrage, in some cases both at the same time. Irving Howe reveals the ambivalence that Roth's fiction typically generates when he says, "His reputation has steadily grown these past few years, he now stands close to the center of our culture (if that is anything for him to be pleased about)," and "we are in the presence not only of an interesting writer but also of a cultural 'case'" [see CLC, Vol. 2].

Roth's wonderfully rich and varied works—the sharp-edged and well-crafted stories in the Goodbye, Columbus collection (1959), the gloomily realistic Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967), the serio-comic Portnoy's Complaint (1969), the fabulistic The Breast (1972), the satiric Our Gang (1971) and The Great American Novel (1973), the candidly autobiographical My Life As a Man (1974)—illustrate important insights into America's cultural predicament as Roth sees it from his own vantage point: up close and personal, as the television commentators say. No other living writer has so rigorously and actively attempted to describe the destructive element of experience in American life—the absurdities and banalities that impinge upon self-realization in this "The Land of Opportunity and the Age of Self-Fulfillment" (as David Kepesh in The Breast says). And no other writer so clearly bridges the buoyant optimism of Jewish-American writers of the fifties and the dark, despairing world view of such recent writers as John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, Anthony Burgess and Jerzy Kosinski. Yet Roth is more often than not dismissed as a cultural "case," as if that explained away the variety and vision of his fiction or mitigated the acute embarrassment that accompanies the spectacle of brash young soldiers obstinately continuing in losing battles.

But of course Howe is right: Roth is a cultural "case" in that he has been both attracted to and repelled by the shaping forces of society—and who of us has not? Here, perhaps, is a key to the popularity that Roth enjoys as a spokesman for a growing sense of disgust, outrage and impotence felt by so many Americans who view the Vietnam War, the Watergate affair, the sensationalism of the press, the fatuousness of popular novels, television sit-coms, broadway shows, indeed the entire phenomenon of American society, with fascination and repulsion. As Norman Podhoretz says in taking issue with Howe, "Roth is now central not because he has sold out … but because in the course of his literary career more and more people have come along who are exactly in tune with the sense of things he has always expressed in his work and who have accordingly and in increasing numbers come to recognize him as their own." (pp. 3-4)

Roth's struggle with American culture has developed along two fronts, one religious and the other artistic. By far the more important of the two has been the artistic battle, one that calls upon the artist to confront American society, "the real thing," head-on. This, Roth feels, is a confrontation that is essential to the writing of fiction and to the writer of fiction. It is, then, with some regret that Roth discovers how uncommon his artistic stance is—and how alone he seems to be in his fight. In a seminal essay entitled "Writing American Fiction" Roth charges that there has been "a voluntary withdrawal of interest by the writer of fiction from some of the grander social and political phenomena of our times." (p. 5)

[Roth] believes it is the writer's task to make an imaginative assault on "the corruptions and vulgarities and treacheries of American public life."… Roth's complaint, like Portnoy's is a sweeping observation about the cultural predicament facing the sensitive, creative individual: American reality, Roth concludes, "stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination,"… and hence it is understandable, perhaps, that many modern writers continue in the romantic strategy of evasion, which involves, as Walter Allen notes, the "opting out of society." (p. 6)

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the hard core of social realism at the center of Roth's artistic creed: it qualifies the most romantic of Roth's early stories and explains his most recent ventures into social and political satire (Our Gang, The Great American Novel) and fantasy (The Breast); it gives credence to Roth's exploration of stereotypes and stereotypic attitudes promulgated by mass media and accepted by some segments of the American public; and, perhaps most importantly, it generates the central conflicts and basic themes found in Roth's fiction. (pp. 6-7)

In emphasizing the predicament that the modern writer faces, Roth suggests a broader predicament, one that is faced, he feels, by many people. Although he has the writer specifically in mind, there is no doubt that the problem he describes is cultural. Making note of Benjamin DeMott's observation that there seems to be today a kind of "universal descent into unreality," Roth goes on to observe that he too is often overwhelmed by the "unreality" of the world that he wants to describe in his fiction…. (p. 7)

"What the hell," exclaimed John Barth recently, as if confirming Roth's observation, "reality is a nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there, and literature never did, very long…. Reality is a drag." Yet it is precisely this predicament that fascinates Roth, captivating his imagination and feeding his creative impulse. He will not be defeated; he will not turn to other matters, other worlds. Like Kafka before him he will turn the familial, communal, and cultural pressures facing him into the very substance of his art. The problems facing the artist become, in Roth's fiction, human problems to be faced by the hero; the "unreality" of American public life exercises a brutal power which the hero can attempt to conquer but cannot evade. Like the hero of Ellison's Invisible Man, whom Roth so admires, the Rothian hero must go out into the world—even if it is only to discover that he is a man without a country, invisible, homeless, a stranger to himself and his deepest beliefs—before he can go underground to wait for a new spring and the promise of hope. (p. 8)

The religious issues raised by Roth's fiction have precipitated a battle of a different sort, yet one that Roth has entered aggressively. Jewish readers and literary critics alike have taken stands on the "Jewishness" of Roth's fiction…. Praised as a Jewish moralist and condemned as a self-hating Jew, Roth has been offered, as David Baroff says, as a "kind of shibboleth for American Jews; they define themselves and other people in terms of how they react to Philip Roth."… The controversies that swirl around the "Jewishness" of Roth's fiction have clouded, in most cases, the more essential questions of Roth's artistry: his affinities with social realism, his vision of human potential, his assault on American reality. It seems, however, that Roth has been called, ironically enough, to bear the standard in a dubious battle, while more fundamentally Jewish writers like Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow have been allowed a graceful retreat behind university walls. (p. 21)

The complaints most often made against Roth's fiction by the Jewish community do not legitimately come under the heading of literary criticism in that such complaints do not derive from an analysis of the fiction. It is true, however, that the values that emerge from Roth's fiction often serve as a point of departure for charges of anti-semitism. After Goodbye, Columbus was published, many rabbis and other members of the Jewish community responded with letters and sermons denouncing Roth's fiction. (p. 22)

The charge of anti-semitism against a Jewish writer is not, of course, new…. In Roth's case, however, charges of anti-semitism have extended beyond the stage of initial reaction, and the question of his Jewishness continues to occupy not only the Jewish community but also serious literary critics—both Jewish and non-Jewish.

If anything is clear about the controversies surrounding Roth's depiction of Jewish life, it is that there is no agreement among respected critics on just how traditionally Jewish Roth's values are. (pp. 23-4)

Roth and his fiction do not yield easily to Jewish-oriented theses about Jewish-American writers and their fiction, primarily because Roth is the most "marginal" of Jews. His reliance on Jewish materials and Jewish values is qualified by an essentially secular and skeptical perspective, a perspective that he has defended vigorously, even in the camp of the supposed enemy—in, that is, Jewish magazines like Commentary and Jewish symposia like the one held in Tel Aviv in 1963. His defense of himself is occasionally acerbic, in large part because of the intense and often heated attacks directed at him and his fiction by critics both inside and outside the Jewish community; his own point of view is, however, both consistent and illuminating, and thus serves as a helpful context for understanding his intentions and achievements as a Jewish-American writer.

Perhaps the most obvious and necessary observation that can be made is that Roth is very tentative about his relation to Judaism. He said in a recent symposium held by Commentary that "there does not seem to me a complex of values or aspirations or beliefs that continue to connect one Jew to another in our country"; rather, Jews are held together by a disbelief in Jesus as Christ. Such a relationship is "enervating and unviable," for any religious, social, or moral community "springs not from disbelief, but faith and conviction." Roth feels that "neither reverence toward the tradition, nor reverent feelings about the Jewish past seem … sufficient to bind American Jews together today," and he himself "cannot find a true and honest place in the history of believers that begins with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." (pp. 29-30)

This is not to say that Roth does not regard himself as a Jew…. Roth feels, however, that the American Jew does not inherit a body of law and learning, but rather a psychological shell without clear historical, cultural or moral substance. Thus, Roth believes, "one had to, then, I think, as one grew up in America, begin to create a moral character for oneself. That is, one had to invent a Jew…. There was a sense of specialness and from then on it was up to you to invent your specialness."… This challenge to invent moral responses and attitudes is for Roth both a blessing and a burden, for it provides one with unique obligations and a special perspective. He concludes, "If I can make any sense about my Jewishness and of my desire to continue to call myself a Jew, it is in terms of my outsideness in the general assumptions of American culture." (pp. 30-1)

It is, of course, precisely this "outsideness in the general assumptions of American culture" that supplies much of the impetus to the satire found in Roth's fiction. Roth does not, however, bring a strong sense of Judaistic heritage to either his fiction or his view of himself as a writer. He makes a fine, but important, distinction when he says, "I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew. The biggest concern and passion in my life is to write fiction, not to be a Jew." (p. 31)

Roth insists … that as a writer and as a thinker his arena of interest is in no sense strictly Jewish, a point that is emphasized, to some degree, by the lack of attention to Jewish characters and to the Jewish milieu in "Novotny's Pain," When She Was Good, Our Gang, and The Great American Novel. He is, if anything, a humanist whose concerns are broadly moral and social, and whose artistic vision, though rooted in the particularities of Jewish life, extends outward to the common humanity shared by all men. (p. 32)

So much is Roth interested in the "human situation," in fact, that he feels no particular empathy for the Jewish characters in his first full-length novel, Letting Go; rather, the "distinction between Jewish characters and Gentiles was not always present in my mind. They existed as individuals, as people." (p. 33)

Roth has repeatedly answered his critics from the Jewish community by insisting that as a writer he has no obligation to write Jewish "propaganda."… [He has said,] "I cannot help but believe that there is a higher moral purpose for the Jewish writer, and the Jewish people, than the improvement of public relations." In regard to his own fiction, Roth strikes a similar note in responding to his critics. When, for example, Jews objected to Roth's depiction of a Jewish adulterer in one of his stories, Roth was quick to point out that adultery is not a uniquely Jewish but rather a human possibility; and when Jews objected to his depiction of a malingering Jewish soldier, Sheldon Grossbart in "Defender of the Faith," Roth responded, "He is not meant to represent The Jew or Jewry…. Grossbart is depicted as a single blundering human being."… Jewish critics, Roth maintains, confuse the purpose of the writer with the purpose of a public relations man. Jews feel that Roth is "informing" on Jews when he should be providing a picture of the positive aspects of Jewish life; Roth argues that he is indeed an informer, but all that he has told the gentiles is that "the perils of human nature afflict the members of our minority." (pp. 33-4)

It is perhaps one of those interesting ironies that Roth, like Kafka, is the most marginal of Jews who, nonetheless, must fight the hardest against religious and communal pressures to deliver himself from his past into his future. If it is true that as a social realist Roth keeps his eye steadily on human character and heroic potential as it is developed in or defeated by communal life in America, it is equally true that his own potential and his own character have been tested by the community—and Roth has responded to the challenge openly and directly, not only in interviews and nonfictional essays but in his fiction as well. Clearly, however, if we would understand Roth's intentions and achievements as a writer of fiction, we must look at his central characters not as Jews in an ideological, traditional, or metaphorical sense, but as men yearning to discover themselves by swimming into dangerous waters beyond social and familial strictures: beyond the last rope. Only by so approaching Roth's fiction are we likely to see what it is that the stories are really about. (pp. 35-6)

In examining the "circumstances of ordinary life," Roth has employed a wide range of artistic techniques resulting in a fictional canon notable for its variety. In fact, the diversity of Roth's fiction has generated evident difficulty in assessing Roth's intention and achievement as a writer of fiction. Certainly most critics acknowledge Philip Roth as a major talent, as one who has been keenly responsive to the human condition as it is revealed in contemporary American experience…. Despite such acknowledgment, however, the critical community has been divided in its response to Roth as a significant contemporary author. Critics have taken stances toward his achievement that are as diverse as the fiction itself: he has been called an anti-semitic and a Jewish moralist, a romantic writer and a realistic writer, a polemicist, a satirist, a mannerist, a sentimentalist, and a liar; he has been praised for having "a clear and critical social vision," condemned for having a "distorted" view of society, and accused of entertaining an "exclusively personal" vision of life that does not include society at all. Whereas Alfred Kazin recently spoke so confidently of what he calls Saul Bellow's "signature," it seems that from the collective viewpoint of the critical community Roth's mark has been something of an indecipherable scrawl. (pp. 199-200)

The uniqueness of Roth's "signature" is intimately associated with his commitment to social realism, to a willingness to confront the community—its manners and its mores—as subject for his art. The confrontation between the hero (activist or victim) and world, between private and public realms, between "un-isolated" individuals and the shaping forces of general life, is the confrontation that is central to the realistic mode—and the fiction of Philip Roth. Certainly many critics have detected in Roth's fiction a noticeable attention to manners, to moral issues, and to literary realism; too often, however, Roth's most characteristic mode has been dismissed…. It is my contention that we can best assess Roth's artistry by viewing him, rather broadly, as a writer whose artistic intentions are "moral," whose method is realistic, and whose subject is the self in society.

Given Solotaroff's contention that Roth's sensibility is embedded in a Jamesian concern for motives and for what Trilling calls "moral realism," it is altogether possible to think that Roth writes, in part, to fill a void that Trilling pointed out in 1948 [in "Manners, Morals and the Novel"]:

Perhaps at no other time has the enterprise of moral realism ever been so much needed, for at no other time have so many people committed themselves to moral righteousness. We have the books that point out the bad conditions, that praise us for taking progressive attitudes. We have no books that raise questions in our minds not only about conditions but about ourselves, that lead us to refine our motives and ask what might lie behind our good impulses.

As our examination of Roth's fiction has shown, the question of what lies behind "good impulses" is one that virtually every major character in his fiction asks. The crises depicted in Roth's fiction are not so much ontological as they are moral, for although the character may begin with the question of identity and selfhood, he is likely to conclude with the questions of Neil Klugman, Gabe Wallach, and Peter Tarnopol: what do I owe to my fellow man, and how do I explain my actions toward him? What is my relation to society, and what are the dangers of the moral life? To what extent have I been victimized by false ideals and self-deceptions grounded in the society of which I am an ineluctable part?

Inevitably, when we hear such questions we think immediately of Tolstoy, Conrad, Dostoevski, Gogol—the great European novelists—and Henry James, America's most prominent novelist of manners and moral realism; nor is it surprising that allusions to these novelists and their works appear frequently in Roth's fiction…. The burdens of responsibility, the clash between the actual world and the "invented reality" that grows out of what one "sees and feels," the moral difficulties of "letting go" (a phrase that Roth borrowed from Mrs. Gereth in The Spoils of Poynton, who tells Fleda Vetch, "Only let yourself go, darling—only let yourself go!")—all these are concerns that Roth has in common not only with James but with other European novelists of manners and moral realism as well. (pp. 202-04)

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Roth's moral interests is that they extend clearly into his conception of art (and here the affinity between Roth and such writers as Henry James is at its strongest). (p. 205)

For Roth, as for James, fiction not only treats moral issues, but has the purpose of elevating and liberating the reader's social and moral consciousness through realistic examination of "man's condition." Just as "those of us who are willing to be taught, and who needed to be, have been made by Invisible Man less stupid than we were about Negro lives," so can the stereotypes of Jewish malingerers, Jewish mothers, Jewish family life, and Protestant Midwestern fathers, mothers, sons and daughters be put into new perspectives—for "the stereotype as often arises from ignorance as from malice." (pp. 206-07)

A strong social and moral consciousness, coupled with a readily evident persuasion toward a realistic portrayal of man in society, points toward Roth's distinctiveness as a contemporary American author, for it is the prevailing opinion that such concerns have never been central to the American literary tradition. In 1948 Lionel Trilling asserted, "The fact is that American writers of genius have not turned their minds to society…. In America in the nineteenth century, Henry James was alone in knowing that to scale the moral and aesthetic heights in the novel one had to use the ladder of social observation." Trilling's contention that "Americans have a kind of resistance to looking closely at society" is not a startling observation, most critics of the American novel would agree. (p. 207)

Certainly Roth is not a proponent of the documentary social novel or a novel of manners in the European sense of the term (for, as Trilling persuasively argues in "Art and Fortune," such a novel is not possible in America); nonetheless, Roth's relation to his contemporaries is more sharply defined if we consider him as a social realist—as a writer, that is, who does not yield to the romantic impulse as defined by Chase, Allen, Lewis, and others. Roth has been characteristically associated with such Jewish-American writers as Mailer, Salinger, Bellow, Malamud, and Gold, when in fact his closest associates among American authors are Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, John P. Marquand—writers who, as James Tuttleton demonstrates, are primarily "concerned with social conventions as they impinge upon character." (p. 208)

In Roth's view, Salinger and Malamud are two of America's best authors, yet their works seem to be curiously out of touch with the actual world. Neither writer "has managed to put his finger on what is most significant in the struggle going on today between the self (all selves, not just the writer's) and the culture."… In the fiction of Saul Bellow and William Styron Roth finds a similar inability or unwillingness to confront the social world in all of its recognizable aspects. In Roth's opinion, the fiction of Bellow and Styron, peopled by heroes who affirm life in foreign and unrealistic climes, is further evidence that our best writers have avoided examining American public life…. Roth's objection to the novelistic strategies of Bellow and Styron certainly places his own attitudes clearly in front of us: the author must confront the social world squarely if he is to describe human character faithfully, and affirmation achieved through geographic displacement or metaphoric evasion is, finally, no affirmation at all. (p. 211)

Roth's assault on the American experience—his exploration of moral fantasy, his concern for moral consciousness, his willingness to confront the grander social and political phenomena of our time—is, I think, the most significant aspect of his art. Despite the diversity of Roth's fiction, despite the variety of themes, values, and characters that emerge from his novels and short stories, we see an abiding faith beneath Roth's pessimism…. Roth has demonstrated a willingness to explore the limits of his artistic creed with a deeply felt concern for man and society, a concern that is detectable beneath his ponderous realistic novels and his most vitriolic satire. (p. 214)

John N. McDaniel, in his The Fiction of Philip Roth, Haddonfield House, 1974, 243 p.