Abstract: Critics often read American Pastoral as primarily concerned with the American Dream, but often overlook the related theme of redemption. Roth’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, admits that he was wrong about the Swede, the novel’s central character, when he assumed that he was uninteresting and two-dimensional. To make it right, Zuckerman struggles to uncover the truth rather than making false assumptions, in hopes of reconstructing a better understanding of the Swede and atoning for his missteps. In doing so, he seeks redemption, both for the Swede and for himself. This essay aims to show how that redemption works in the novel and how Zuckerman’s journey is as important, if not more so, than the Swede’s.

Abstract: Celebrity, fame, reputation, renown—all of these terms apply to Philip Roth, the award-winning novelist who sought and rejected attention. The nature of Roth’s relationship with fame and the steps he took to achieve and renounce it are the focus of this essay. Why did Roth insist on writing advertising copy for Goodbye, Columbus (1959 ) , but then leave the country when Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) was published? Why did he insist on controlling his interviews and demand final approval, yet present himself as an affable, cooperative subject as long as the questions were previously submitted and he had the final say? Why did he seemingly curb his Jewish identity but at eighty-one graciously accept an honorary degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary? Why did he encourage Claudia Roth Pierpont and Blake Bailey to write about him yet dissuade others from writing about his private life? How did self-protection and self-promotion intersect? Answers to these and other questions form the substance of this discussion, which will outline the politics of privacy and the price of fame. Did Roth pursue and then reject fame because he knew it was transparent and false? Or was he on a constant quest for recognition validating his literary enterprise?

Abstract: The title character of Sabbath's Theater (1995) is a noted iconoclast. Most treatments of Sabbath's character attempt to reconcile his social deviance with his traumatic past—the death of his brother in war, his lover to cancer, and his first wife in absentia. Implied in these readings is a surprising truth about Sabbath: he is, despite himself, a traditionalist. This essay argues that Sabbath (like Roth) is committed to the conventions of literary realism, but this commitment is tested throughout the novel; realist techniques continually fail to address Sabbath's grief, revealing their aesthetic and affective limits. Sabbath's Theater is thus a sustained critique of the very form in which it is written—an airing of grievances with literary realism itself.

The Newark I Never Knew Louis Gordon (bio) MEMOIR AS INTRODUCTION I was born in Beth Israel Hospital in Newark in 1963, some thirty years after Philip Roth's birth. But the city changed so much over the next three and a half years that my brother was delivered at St. Barnabas in Livingston. For many Roth scholars, the geography may not mean that much, but to me, the change in birth sites epitomizes the loss of an entire way of urban American Jewish life that largely evaporated in the late 1960s. For many of my generation, the defining difference between us and our parents was the move to the suburbs and loss of a cohesive community. Roth may be a lot of things to different readers, but in a way that no other writer could, he opened the door—even if only halfway—to an earlier America that seemed closed to those of us who grew up in the Jersey suburbs in the 1970s. I first encountered Roth through the television premier of an adaptation of his novella, "Goodbye, Columbus" (1959), which was screened on New York area television around 1975. I couldn't see the ending because it was after my bedtime, but if the film symbolized the division between the new and the old in an era of abolished cultural norms, the old seemed much better. It probably would have come as a shock to Roth, who viewed himself as a rebel, that Neil Klugman seemed to me to be the type of square that I had wished still existed in the 1970s! And that image is even more pronounced in the film where the clean-cut veteran, Klugman, is contrasted with the long-haired rock musicians who play at the country club where he romances Brenda. Fast forward about six years to my last years of yeshiva high school in the Elmora section of Elizabeth, which is the same neighborhood where the Swede's wife, Dawn Dwyer, attended church at St. Genevieve's, and which is only about a ten-minute drive from Newark. Some of my classmates lived on the fringe of the inner-city neighborhood that was now Weequahic; one actually lived in that formerly Jewish neighborhood. Though my peers didn't speak much about Roth, at the beginning of my senior year I stumbled across a copy of Portnoy's Complaint (1969) in a used bookstore. The novel intrigued me but not for the reasons that an entire crowd of assimilated Jews liked it. As a yeshiva high school student in 1980, I knew very well [End Page 59] that Roth had a limited understanding of Jewish tradition. But I was drawn to the fact that he was talking about Newark. Roth's Newark was all around me. My classmate's father had participated in the Southside bonfires against Weequahic that Roth depicted in Portnoy's Complaint, and I had another classmate whose father, a student at Weequahic High School with Roth, was able to separate some of the myths about Roth from the facts. But it was not until the mid-1990s when I was living in Los Angeles that I published what would be the first of my essays, "Philip Roth as He Has Never Been Read Before." In it were the seeds of the type of criticism on Roth's work (is it New Historicism or Cultural Materialism?) that I have been engaged in for the last several years. At some point, my New Jersey origins and literary reading led me to start writing interpretations of Roth that I didn't see anywhere else. NEW HISTORICISM OR CULTURAL MATERIALISM? What Roth did for Newark is unparalleled in literary annals due to the sheer number of books he produced. From the beginning, Roth both thrilled and repelled the hometown crowd. Jane Wallerstein reviewing Roth's first collection in Newark's Jewish News notes that "it isn't often that Essex County appears in fiction, as it does, by grace of a former Newarker, in Goodbye, Columbus. The presence of familiar places in print is one reason why this collection of short stories is absorbing" (17). But, Wallerstein continues, "[a]s an...

What might readers infer from the identical titles and related concerns of Sartre's "Pourquoi écrire?" ("Why Write?") and Roth's Why Write?, his collected nonfiction, 1960-2013? Some of the concerns of that volume appear to link the more pervasive synthesis of nothingness and possibility in Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) to Arthur Koestler's advocacy, in Insight and Outlook (1949), of "bisociative" cognition. At stake, for Roth, when reading himself and others, are incisive rejoinders to "insensate readers" who, ignoring the difference between personal identity and imaginative excursion, surrender personal responsibility while denigrating artistic prowess.

Abstract: Much of the discourse surrounding Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) either deals with the novel as about America and American self-making or as about Coleman Silk. Little scholarship, however, deals with Zuckerman, the narrator, as a character central to the story; this essay seeks to show that Zuckerman not only invents the personal lives of his characters, but he invents himself, and he does so through his semi-imagined versions of each of the characters. Coleman is who he wishes himself to be, Farley is Zuckerman’s model of how not to live, Delphine is the warning about the very book he writes—the version of himself that lies about who he is—and Faunia acts as his moral compass and guide, perhaps the most important of his creations given how his narrative decisions reflect her sensibilities. Zuckerman’s characterizations of the key players and his suppositions about their interiority, then, result in Zuckerman’s own characterization.

Reverse Biography:The Philip Roth We Still Don't Know by Jacques Berlinerblau Eric Vanderwall (bio) Jacques Berlinerblau. The Philip Roth We Don't Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography. University of Virginia Press, 2021. 230 pp. $29.95 hardback. Compared to other recent books about roth, georgetown professor Jacques Berlinerblau's The Philip Roth We Don't Know (2021) is unusual. James Atlas and Benjamin Taylor gave us admiring personal reminiscences about their friendships with the late author. Ira Nadel's and Blake Bailey's biographies each attempted to give a definitive account of Roth's life. Unlike the aforementioned authors, Berlinerblau was neither a close associate of Roth (as Atlas, Taylor, and Bailey were) nor was he the target of a lawsuit on the basis of academic publications Roth disliked (as Nadel was). Berlinerblau's book itself is markedly different, too, in positing a new approach to the Roth oeuvre that takes the social phenomenon of #MeToo into account: reverse biography. This new method examines the entire corpus (including stories that were never anthologized or collected) to detect the author's "obsessional themes" (15), which Berlinerblau claims can ultimately explain the author as a person. These "obsessional themes" can also, he says, provide the basis for a hypothetical future biographical investigation that would be superior to biographical works, such as Bailey's and Claudia Roth Pierpont's, that lacked critical distance (14-15). The Philip Roth We Don't Know broaches some issues worthy of attention, but its worth is compromised throughout by a flawed method with unsound epistemology and the absence of a justification for what is essentially a biographical reading of fiction patinated with modish terms. Berlinerblau's title promises to reveal Philip Roth as he has never been understood, but this promise goes unfulfilled. There are failures in this book beginning with its strangely construed purpose. In the first paragraph of the introduction (subtitled "Art Is Slimy/Reverse Biography"), Berlinerblau frames the impetus for developing a new approach to Roth as the problem of the author being a "really, really hard sell" to young readers "attuned to our age's [End Page 92] sensitivities about gender, race, and class" (1). The reverse biographer seems to see the issue as finding "a way of selling [Roth] to the current generation, where he is often seen as just another White Guy who prose-ogled women's bodies" (16). Berlinerblau also admits in the first sentence of the conclusion that he began this project by "wondering about Philip Roth's commercial viability among a readership with cultural sensibilities that may be different from his own" (127). This sounds more like the objective of marketing (convincing people to believe something in order to get their money) than of scholarship (engaging in research to derive insight without presuppositions about what ought to be discovered). It also seems like an instructor's abrogation of his duty to educate and challenge the pupils, not cater to their preferences. What Berlinerblau seems to want to do is find a way, using the terminology and approaches now current, to demonstrate that Roth's corpus continues to be relevant and that ideas that have come to prominence in the last several years are the best means for accomplishing the task. None of this quite happens. Instead Berlinerblau commits the fallacies of assuming Roth to be a "master" (an honorific that itself seems worthy of interrogation), that the beliefs of undergraduate students (who have, after all, ostensibly come to university studies to challenge their preconceptions and thereby develop a more nuanced understanding of the world) should be the primary factor in dictating the direction of the field, and that the best way to go about this is with the methods and language of "selling." Throughout the reverse biography, Berlinerblau continually insists on Roth's status as a "master" (15, 52, 79) of "unique genius" (123) and "spectacular talent" (123). Such designations imply a hierarchy of value independent of canonical status, trends, prevailing taste, etc. If Roth is a master according to such a set of values, then "selling" would not be a consideration at all because the oeuvre's intrinsic value justifies its being taught regardless...