[As] an artist Roth has placed his faith in Realism, not Judaism…. [From] the wider perspective available when the ethnic emphasis is set aside for a while, Roth's career is not marked by a vagrant choice of subjects but by a single-minded dedication to a significant goal: finding subjects and techniques which will reveal the effect of the interpenetration of reality and fantasy in the lives of his representative Americans. This concern is what makes an aesthetically coherent whole of his otherwise diverse fictions and supplies the developmental logic which his critics have so often failed to discern. (p. 9)

[In Goodbye, Columbus] Roth is already preoccupied with the central conflicts in American life as they are experienced in the everyday lives of his Jewish characters. These conflicts are economic, psychological, and generational, as well as religious, and they repeatedly point to the underlying incongruity between ethical ideals and material realities in American culture…. [Even in this early work Jewishness is used not to universalize,] but to particularize: to make universal conflicts more specific—"of a time, a place, a group of people, a situation"—and thus more realistic. (p. 19)

In each of the stories [in Goodbye, Columbus] we learn what reality feels like to the protagonist and are encouraged to see the world as he sees it. And this is an important point to recognize at the outset, since this identification of hero and narrator has been Roth's most characteristic fictive voice from the beginning of his career to the present. (p. 33)

Neil [the protagonist of Goodbye, Columbus] should not be confused with Philip Roth. Neil's awareness of his own motives … is never fully equal to his creator's, for the ingenuous questions he poses at the end of his narrative have already been carefully answered in the story itself. Completely accepting Neil's version of events, then, is misleading; instead we must read between the lines, noticing what he does not say as well as what he does in order to draw essential conclusions and implications….

The libidinous and acquisitive part of Neil sees Brenda and the affluent suburban world she inhabits, transforms them into a Polynesian maiden dwelling in an exotic American Tahiti, cam-ouflages itself under the guise of love, and cries, "I want!" At the same time the disapproving moralist in him sees a spoiled little rich girl, a family of Brobdingnags living in a world of conformity and expedience, and decorously protests, "I am horrified." This internal struggle—and Neil's hazy awareness that he has been more willing than he would like to admit to heed the acquisitive cry and ignore the horrified whisper—is what gives his retrospective narrative its bitter, misanthropic tone. Like Portnoy [the central character of Roth's Portnoy's Complaint], he seeks revenge and vents his frustration through verbal abuse; unlike his liberated successor, however, he is denied the outlet of obscenity and must settle for a more restrained mode of satiric attack. (p. 35)

What Neil never fully acknowledges,… is that Brenda is both a person and a symbol to him. She has no life in the novella except as a projection of his desires and fears. Without being fully conscious of it—even in retrospect as he tries to sort out their affair—he sublimates his immediate dislike for her as a person in the interest of his quest for the American Dream of money, status, and Edenic satiety which she and her family personify…. While Neil never appreciates the crucial distinction between loving and wanting Brenda and loving and wanting what she represents, Roth tries to make sure that the reader will. (p. 37)

Like Goodbye, Columbus, Letting Go is a novel of initiation and education. While it exhibits the same mastery of American vernacular, social detail, and characterization which his critics had admired in Goodbye, Columbus, however, Roth's novel is a much more difficult, much more complex work than his relatively slight collection. The tendency toward facile polarization of language and character which too frequently marred his early stories—a willingness to rely too heavily on sharp contrasts between the superior sensibilities of his struggling heroes and the inflexibility of the self-satisfied characters who surrounded them which inevitably pushed those stories into the realm of caricature and farce—is all but abandoned in Letting Go. Though social satire is still a prominent element in Roth's art, strict moral schematization is replaced in this novel by an acceptance of the centrality of accident and ambiguity to the realistic depiction of contemporary life. The novel, unlike the stories, is far too complex to allow the comforts of easily distilled moral judgments or clearly defined heroes and villains. Instead, it presents a world as cluttered by seemingly inconsequential action and trivial incident, as unpredictable and defiant of simple definition, as the real world it so accurately reflects; and peoples it with characters as caught up in the web of conflicting moral demands, as frustrated by their inability to make reality conform to their aspirations, as are many of its readers. (p. 48)

[Almost] nothing happens in Letting Go which does not illuminate or advance the psychological journey of its central characters from innocence to experience and maturity. We forgive the first novelist his weaknesses—an occasionally embarrassing stab at portentousness, several arbitrary shifts in point of view, some excessive repetition, a few characters … who are used rather than explored, a perceptible drop in interest in the last hundred pages or so—because his book is finally such an impressive achievement in the mode of Jamesian psychological realism in spite of them.

More importantly, we are willing to overlook these weaknesses in retrospect because, like the characters in the novel, we cannot help but conclude the experience of Letting Go with a deeper understanding of [its] uncomfortable truths…. (p. 59)

The same gloomy aura of inevitability which marked Roth's first novel permeates his second [When She Was Good], and together they can be viewed as somber companion pieces which explore the lives of the American generation which reached its maturity in the Fifties. Letting Go, Roth's contemporary variation on the characters and themes of [Henry James's] The Portrait of a Lady, investigated the psychological debts and sorrows of the urban, college-educated members of that generation in a Jamesian style and language exactly suited to its subjects. When She Was Good, his Midwestern Madame Bovary, his contemporary Main Street, focuses on the remaining members of that generation: the men and women from small towns and suburbs who never went to college or never finished, those who were seemingly predestined to grow up, marry, raise their children, and die within an afternoon's drive of the places where they were born…. (pp. 63-4)

Its disruption of simple chronology, its use of changing centers of consciousness, its repetition of the same incident from several points of view, its guise of authorial objectivity all testify to its technical modernity. Revealing all of the novel's major incidents in the first forty pages, and then spending 250 pages retelling them—and retelling them in the banal language of the characters themselves besides—is a particularly modern approach. Through his linguistic choice, Roth manages to make all of the popular American clichés … tangible factors in the lives of his characters. The limitations of that language effectively mirror the limitations of possibility and perspective which are the fundamental antagonists in [his female protagonist's] pathetic tale. Characteristically, Roth's choice of language and narrative viewpoint forces us into the point of view of Liberty Center's inhabitants, compels us to share their restricted perspective.

Within its melodramatic framework Roth's text unconventionally challenges the sympathetic presuppositions of readers accustomed to finding in American fiction a series of recognizable variations on the archetypal male/female relationship…. (p. 66)

Roth attempted to reverse authorial and reader sympathy throughout most of the book. By presenting much of the story through Lucy's eyes, When She Was Good … attempts to make the reader view the conflict from the woman's perspective. Roth shows why Lucy became a paranoiac shrew, why she did what she did, why a life which begins in a typical desire to do and be good becomes a masochistic extravaganza instead. In the process, he provides devastating insights into the toil in pain and pathology which the archetypal male/female roles can exact from all concerned. (p. 68)

The complexity of When She Was Good is suggested by the fact that while Roth's characters are typical … (as are the characters in most of his fiction) and, therefore, his tale is realistic …, Roth frames his story in formal devices designed to create an aura of myth and legend about it—as Hemingway had done in The Old Man and the Sea and Carson McCullers did in her Ballad of the Sad Café. He sets his tale in the recent past, for example, recognizing that Americans evidence a "dedication to the past so brief that it was legend before it hardened into fact." He makes the story's geographical location intentionally vague: … all we really know is that Liberty Center is somewhere north of Chicago. The name of his town, Liberty Center, metaphorically suggests its symbolic nature and is an ironic commentary on the pathetically limited perspectives and possibilities of its inhabitants as well. The narrative begins in an omniscient, objective, third-person voice, gradually shades into the voice of Willard Carroll, then into the voices of Roy and Lucy, before concluding in the same objective voice in which it began. The effect of framing the story in a prologue and epitaph narrated in this omniscient voice is two-fold. It distances the action and assigns it a legendary, folkloric quality; and, like the choruses in Greek tragedy, it serves to set the scene and comment on the final outcome, producing the effect of ironic understatement in the book's closing pages. Within this framework, the characters' language is tightly controlled so that it maintains a typical tone and vocabulary throughout. (pp. 70-1)

In each of his earlier fictions Roth had attempted to find the most effective means to convey the feel of our cockeyed world, the quality of the social being's private life, the forces at work in those public and private worlds as a particular, representative individual perceived them. In Portnoy's Complaint he found a new, perhaps ideal, way of telling that tale…. Through the device of the psychoanalytic monologue Roth managed to combine the best features of both [fantasy and realism].

The advantages of this stylistic choice are numerous. The psychoanalytic setting provides a realistic justification for Portnoy's vehement soul-baring and finger-pointing, for his use of words and images which would be unacceptable in a more public context, and also for his emphasis on sexual memories. It also provides him with an audience, essential since Portnoy is both analysand and performer, character and author in his own seriocomic tale. The dramatic monologue which this setting provokes has the effect of locking us into Portnoy's vision of the world; and his viewpoint is unqualified by any other (until the punch line), reveals as no other could his interpretation of the burden of his reality…. [We] are forced (as he is) constantly to question where the line between objective reality and his pathological fantasies lies. We are, in other words, forced to consider the interpenetration of reality and fantasy in a life, and are, by extension, made conscious of the same interpenetration in our lives. The monologue form also permits digressions, exaggerations, repetitions, descriptions, and oversimplifications which, while vital to our understanding of Portnoy's character and psychology, would be less acceptable in another narrative context. (pp. 87-8)

Roth's exercise of style as a means to freedom of consciousness and expression … is in the American grain; and so is the subject which that style is meant to expose and explore—Portnoy's complaint. For like his American forebears, Alexander Portnoy wants most of all to be free—of his past and its burdens, of the weight of a culturally formed conscience and consciousness. Like [them], he seeks impossibly total satisfaction, impossibly complete freedoms from his environment, and lashes out at the world where he cannot find them. And reaction to his particular experience of the traditional American conflicts—of self vs. society, freedom vs. responsibility, pleasure vs. duty, self-definition vs. societal definition—is to pursue equally traditional American dreams of escape. (p. 90)

Alex cannot escape his civilization's discontents through physical flight because he has already internalized them. He is a victim of what Tony Tanner has characterized as the American hero's worst nightmare—conditioning. And he can find no escape from it except obscenity and the psychiatrist's couch—and even there he is not really free. (p. 91)

Alex is anything but a "hip" young Sixties man who uses obscenity almost unconsciously as an indication of his liberation from the older mores and taboos. To Portnoy obscenity is an achievement—and a weapon. He uses it because, like his parents and the society whose sexual conventions he is struggling so hard to violate, he thinks it is "dirty" too. He knows that the words he uses offend; they are meant to. He is obscene because he believes that through language he can break down the battlements of his own moral defenses—defenses which have been imposed on him by his society. But since he has internalized his Jewish and American societies' values, by talking and acting "dirty" all he really manages to do is increase the guilt which binds and tortures him. The guiltier he feels, the more frustrated he becomes; the more frustrated he becomes, the more vehement is his obscenity and his sexual promiscuity. Until finally he is literally speechless, caught in the whirlpool of this vicious circle, only able to express himself through an anguished howl of pain at his condition.

"Why must you use that word all the time?" Portnoy's Jewish Pumpkin asks two pages before that closing howl …, and "Why he must," Roth [has said,] "is what the book is all about."… It is finally fair to say [that] the "bad" language in Portnoy's Complaint … is a perfect expression of the conflict in the book. That language places Portnoy's Complaint in the tradition of native American humor, and that central conflict indicates his relationship to the characters of Roth's earlier and later fiction. (p. 94)

Like all of Roth's hero's, Portnoy is torn between the redemptive impulses of the moralist and the less-worthy impulses of the self-indulgent libidinous slob…. Like them Portnoy feels called upon to redeem the neurotic woman he is involved with; like them, he both shuns and covets that role. He is, like all of Roth's heroes, "locked up inself," struggling to come to terms with the burden of his past, to submerge the pleasure principle to the reality principle and emerge from the process whole. (p. 96)

[In Richard Nixon many] writers, like Roth, who are concerned with the meaning and usage of words—have always seen the apotheosis of the opportunistic politician who twists and corrupts the language for his own purposes. (p. 99)

What distinguishes Roth's effort [Our Gang] from … others is not so much its accurate mimicry of Nixon's numerous verbal tics—such mimicry is only to be expected from a writer whose ear for American speech has been characterized as the "finest since Sinclair Lewis." Its originality lies instead in its application of the comic techniques of Swift and, perhaps more importantly, the nineteenth-century native American humorists, in an effort to expose and deflate its subject—to counterbalance the dignity and reverence which shielded him by ridicule and disdain. (pp. 99-100)

[In its] lack of subtlety, and in its use of deflationary parody, burlesque, reductio ad absurdum, blatantly ad hominem attack, buffoonery, and abusive language, Our Gang fits neatly into the ranks of American political satire. (p. 102)

[In Roth's] version of the Our Gang comedies, pint-sized pranksters full of mischief and cute schemes, in and out of "scrapes" … become full-sized con-men, with heartless and harmful schemes which threaten us all. Nothing is too crude or too low, the theory behind such satire goes, as long as it serves the purpose of reducing the exalted leaders to the point where their flaws can be suggested or exposed. Thus the comedy is Keystone because of its slapstick and vaudevillelike schtick. But underlying the humor, just beneath the surface and never completely out of mind, is the uncomfortable recognition that though Tricky Dick and his friends are outrageous parodies, fictional constructs as unreal as Sophie Portnoy or the Patriot League, they are also just real enough to make us stop between laughs and shudder. (p. 104)

Our Gang was written hurriedly and must ultimately be judged an uneven, slapdash affair. Although it is funny—in parts immensely funny—it is a failure. And it is a failure on its own terms—as literature. Though different in kind, When She Was Good is also one of Roth's most "political" works; and the earlier book's strengths point up. the source of Our Gang's weakness. Both were designed as works that would alter their readers' perceptions. When She Was Good succeeds in that task because its typical story draws readers who might disagree with Roth's views about American self-righteousness—draws them into the life and thoughts of a heroine and through her story causes them to see things in a new way. Our Gang does not…. When She Was Good creates a disposition to look at things in a certain way through its artistic power, Our Gang depends for its effect upon its reader being predisposed to its biases and perspective. (pp. 107-08)

In The Great American Novel morality and satire are secondary; comedy—for its own sake and as an expression of the artist's consciousness set free—is paramount. It is his funniest, most purely comic novel, a tour de force of native American humor's techniques which makes his use of those techniques in his other comic fiction that much clearer. (p. 109)

[The] stories which grew out of oral sources on the frontier made extensive use of the vernacular, seldom indulged in subtle psychologizing, emphasized masculine pastimes, derived much of their humor from physical discomfort, employed exaggeration and popular myth, and dealt chiefly with the lower classes of society. The content of The Great American Novel displays each of these characteristics too….

Roth has [accurately] reproduced the vernacular of his ball-players. Profanity, clichés, racial epithets, and ungrammatical constructions abound in The Great American Novel, just as they do in American speech. (p. 110)

The form of The Great American Novel also resembles that of the Southwestern tales…. Oral sources tend to foster stories made up of "episodes and anecdotes rather than thoroughly integrated plots." And though … [Roth's novel has] more of a plot line than Southwestern tales characteristically possess, it is still essentially a "picaresque novel in the form of anecdotes within a framework."… (p. 113)

In one sense, both Our Gang and The Great American Novel can be seen as false steps—in spite of their comic inventiveness and their exploration of the fantastic nature of the authorized versions of reality in the American "asylum." For by choosing to focus on the public sphere in both of them, Roth sacrificed much of the "felt life" which has given his best fictions their intensity and power. Both books are vulnerable to charges of unevenness and superficiality; and The Great American Novel skirts the "crudest forms of frontier psychology."… Both suffer because they place a priority on the public life which does not allow Roth to exercise his most outstanding talent: his ability to project the private confusions and domestic crises of heroes grappling with unmanageable realities we all must face in one form or another. (pp. 121-22)

[The Breast] is best approached as a transitional work which bridges the wide technical and thematic gap which separates [The Great American Novel and My Life as a Man, two] highly disparate books. The Breast bridges that gap by employing an inversion of the tall-tale pattern used in The Great American Novel to highlight the existential and aesthetic questions which dominate My Life as a Man. Its language is a combination of the obscenity which marks his comic fiction and the more moderate and restrained diction of his other work…. The story focuses, as all of his best work has, on the social being's private life—but in this case that private life belongs to a man turned into a creature as fantastic as the Big Bear of Arkansas. (p. 132)

[In earlier books] Roth began with real people and events and then fantastically exaggerated them for comic effect in an effort to convey the texture of the reality that he sees around him. In The Breast he reverses that process, begins with a patently unreal event, a fantastic and comic transformation, and then explores its implications with restraint and rigorous realism. The approach is a cross between Kafka's and the Southwestern humorist's.

Though it was inspired by Kafka's ["The Metamorphosis"], however, Roth's story is marked by a critical difference in intention. Where his predecessor's third-person narrative insists on the reality of its situation through its use of point of view, Roth's first-person tale tries to make its readers accept "the fantastic situation as taking place in what we call the real world," at the same time that it works to make "the reality of the horror one of the issues of the story." Kafka chose to deny his story some of its potential ramifications by asserting on the first page that Gregor's transformation into a gigantic beetle "was no dream"; Roth makes explanation—and the impulse toward explanation—a central element in his tale. Kepesh cannot be absolutely sure of where the reality of his predicament lies, and so neither can we. Whether his transformation is or isn't a "dream, or a hallucination, or a psychotic delusion" is the question which determines both the form and the meaning of The Breast…. (p. 134)

Through his use of this perspective, Roth manages to create a provocative fable: of a rational man forced to acknowledge the irrationality of experience, of the artist struggling to make the incredibility of reality credible in his fiction and thereby create ordered art out of chaotic and disordered experience. The vehicle for his fable is the story of a moral humanist absurdly confronted with the ulitmate in dehumanizing reification: metamorphosis into a 155-pound erogenous zone. (pp. 134-35)

Left with nothing but sensation, speculation, and faulty expression, [Kepesh] is more literally "locked up in self" than any of Roth's other heroes. But not only is he the Roth hero in extremis, he is more alienated, more solipsistic, than any other hero in recent American fiction. He is pure self-consciousness and can do nothing but think about his condition and its possible causes. (p. 136)

His best novel to date, [My Life as a Man] can be read on at least four levels: as deeply moving confession of the intimate details of a destructive marriage, as a coda to the persistent concerns of all his previous work, as an exemplary tale on the process of creating art out of the emotional welter of personal experience, and as the most fully realized of Roth's recent variations on Kafkan themes and techniques. A complex and multi-faceted work, it is the kind of book which compels its readers to reconsider all that its author has written before, and provides a standard of excellence by which to measure all that may follow. (p. 142)

Roth has never envisioned [his characters] more completely or conveyed the misery of their predicament with more intense effect [than in My Life as a Man]. What is relatively new, in a body of fiction whose persistent flaw has been a tendency toward diffusiveness, is a clear structural principle which molds the action into a coherent whole and offers another level of meaning beyond that of the surface conflict. Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, and The Professor of Desire are the only other full-length works in which Roth has displayed such complete control of his materials; and My Life as a Man sheds light on all of the work which separates these three milestones. Rereading his major fiction with it as a guide, shows more clearly than any critical argument can that, though Roth's techniques have varied …, his central preoccupations have remained … constant. (p. 148)

Like Tarnopol [the protagonist], Roth has sought the right narrative voice, the right techniques; and the imaginative recapitulation of that search and its attendant difficulties serves as the underlying structural principle of My Life as a Man. How does one express the incredibility of the private and public quotidian? How does one turn the personal frustration and impotence that incredibility inspires into art? These are the questions Roth and Tarnopol try to answer in their writing. (p. 149)

Like [each of Roth's heroes and heroines, Tarnopol] is obsessed. Each of them reacts to the feel of his or her cockeyed world by constructing fictions—more often useless than useful—designed to cope with that reality. The narrative voice in Roth's major fiction has gradually assumed the characteristic form of a self-contained monologue narrated by an artist-figure; and that progress is repeated in the movement of the narrative voices of the sections of My Life as a Man—from third person, to first person, to autobiographical monologue…. We are constantly forced to ask … just how much of the narrator's obsession is grounded in reality, and how much is a projection of his or her own paranoia. The uncomfortable sense of ambiguity this point of view produces in the reader is exactly the effect Roth is trying to create.

In My Life as Man Roth intensifies this sense of ambiguity by using details from his own biography…. He makes the line between fact and fiction, the real and the imaginary, even more difficult to find than it usually is in his fiction by making many of the details or Tarnopol's life correspond to the publicly known details of his own. (pp. 151-52)

Roth's use of biographical references has several other functions as well. While many of the details of Tarnopol's biography parallel those in Roth's, they also reflect those of many other contemporary American writers. In a sense, the book is not just Tarnopol's story but a kind of "Everybody's Autobiography." (p. 152)

Tarnopol's marital melodrama is not just a paradigm for many of the marriages of the Fifties, or for the impact on the personal level of what Roth has described as the "demythologizing decade" of the Sixties: it is also a paradigm of the difficulties that every artist faces when he tries to create structured, controlled, meaningful art out of incredible and disordered public and private experience. (p. 153)

[The] reader of The Professor of Desire who returns to The Breast in hot pursuit of relationships will find as many discrepancies as connections…. On the whole, of course, the facts and characterizations of the two novels do coincide closely enough for the later book to be viewed as an "antecedent" of The Breast—and we are certainly fortunate that Roth did not feel too tightly bound by the sketchy character conceptions of the earlier, slighter book. But it is probably best simply to note the obvious connections and then move on to consider The Professor of Desire on its own terms, rather than to read it for hints of the absurd metamorphosis we know a character named Kepesh will later undergo. (pp. 159-60)

The Professor of Desire [is] one of the most formal of Roth's fictions. This formality is not imposed from without, however, but integral to the novel's contents. For the entire book may be viewed as a monologue in the present tense that is the introductory lecture on "the professor's desire" which Kepesh prepares during the last half of the book for his comparative literature seminar, "Desire 341."… [This is] a debate between the two sides of his nature [the disapproving moralist and the libidinous slob], with each side scoring points and the final decision no more available than knowledge of the future…. Every incident, every character, every detail, every nuance and shift in tone of voice is carefully chosen to elaborate this conflict in this context. (pp. 160-61)

[One] of the most significant aspects of The Professor of Desire is that, in it, Kafka's spirit is joined—and, for much of the novel, superseded—by Anton Chekhov's…. [This] new influence modifies the Kafkan tone of his two previous novels, producing a tenderness, a compassion, and an extension of authorial sympathy beyond the protagonist that add yet another dimension to his work. (p. 166)

Kindness and humanity, a sense of the unexplainable mystery of life, a blend of comedy and pathos, a sympathy for the human condition and a hard-won understanding—these are the qualities, present sporadically in all of Roth's work, which are developed most fully through this [new Chekhovian] voice. (p. 168)

The Professor of Desire [seems] most Chekhovian as it ends. "Chekhovian," because it displays the same qualities Kepesh admired in "Lady with a Lap Dog"—a movingly transparent ending, "no false mysteries, only the harsh facts directly stated"; "ridicule and irony" gradually giving way to "sorrow and pathos"; a "feel for the disillusioning moment and for the processes wherein actuality pounces upon even our most harmless illusions, not to mention the grand dreams of fulfillment and adventure."… And "Chekhovian" in the same way that Roth applied the label to [a story by Czech author Milan Kundera]: "not merely because of its tone, or its concern with the painful and touching consequences of time passing and old selves dying, but because it is so very good."… (p. 169)

Bernard F. Rodgers, Jr., in his Philip Roth (copyright © 1978 by Twayne Publishers. Inc.; reprinted with the permission of Twayne Publishers, a Division of G. K. Hall & Co., Boston), Twayne, 1978, 192 p.