Roth will be remembered – and deserves to be celebrated – for his fearlessness, his formal audacity and stylistic brilliance, and his ability to reinvent himself in unexpected and sometimes startling ways. But I have never felt like walking out or giving up. I have been reading Roth for over 30 years and writing about him, on and off, for more than two decades, and as with any long-term relationship, mine with Roth has had its ups and downs. It is that voice which still held me in thrall as I read the final words of his final novel, Nemesis (2010), as a middle-aged professor. It is that compelling voice which bewitched me when I read the opening pages of Portnoy’s Complaint as a teenager. At one point in The Ghost Writer (1979) Nathan Zuckerman – the author protagonist of many of Roth’s novels – is told by his mentor, E I Lonoff, that he has “the most compelling voice I’ve encountered in years”.
Roth’s work grabs you and won’t let you go. Won’t let up.” This applies equally to all his work. In an interview with the Paris Review in 1984, Roth remarked of his 1983 novel The Anatomy Lesson that: “The book won’t leave you alone. But above all, Roth is obsessive, compulsive, restless, driven. He also wrote an outrageous satire of an incumbent president in Our Gang (1971) and a dystopian tale of a fascist presidency in The Plot Against America (2004).Īlthough the style and content of Roth’s fiction is extraordinarily diverse, there is always audible a distinctive voice: irreverent yet earnest, questioning yet authoritative, subtle and nuanced yet powerful and passionate. The versatility and variety of his work doesn’t end there.
Then think of the social realism of Goodbye, Columbus (1959), that’s plot turns on the use of a birth control device in the period prior to the availability of the contraceptive pill, or the grotesque surrealism of The Breast (1972), the story of a professor of literature who metamorphoses overnight into a giant mammary gland. There are the extravagant excesses of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), couched in the form of a psychoanalytical monologue, and the pared-down, elliptical exchanges of Deception (1990), a novel written entirely in dialogue. There’s the high seriousness of Letting Go (1962) and the low humour of The Great American Novel (1973).
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