Born in 1933, the oldest child of a first generation Jewish-American family in Newark, New Jersey, Philip Roth's first novella Goodbye Columbus was published when he was just 26. However, it was only after the release of Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 that Mr Roth reached critical acclaim.
What most readers find so compelling about Mr Roth is his phallocentric view combined with the Jewish-American predicament and man's fallen soul - in Mr Roth's case into bed. In Portnoy's Complaint, for instance, the protagonist is Newark-born and bred, 14-year-old Alex Portnoy, whose sex-fraught desires clash with the morals of his Jewish education and his mother's incessant breathing down his neck.
Mr Roth has recently admitted that a scene he witnessed at a friend's funeral had not only enthralled and fascinated him but also made him itch with envy. All the women his friend had met during his life were all present, weeping. Mr Roth said that such an event marks a man's life even after it has ended. For the author such a moment could never happen - his writing has engulfed his life.
Mr Roth's fiction, unlike that of most writers, is not an extension of his life, but like the title he chose for his 1978 novel, it is The Counterlife. He opted out of life and became a recluse for his fiction writing. Like Portnoy he is a "good" boy who wants to become "bad", fully aware that this can only happen through fiction. Enter Nathan Zuckerman, one of Mr Roth's main protagonists to whom he has dedicated nine novels.
Zuckerman is Mr Roth's alter ego, a writer as well as a bed-hopper, who serves Mr Roth's emotional and intellectual purposes without coddling into the autobiographical. Like Mr Roth, Zuckerman appears to be "a Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple, or an army, or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple", as Zuckerman states in The Counterlife.
Repeating to the brink of exhaustion that being Jewish-American was not a cause that led him to become a writer, as he was first and foremost a writer who also happened to be Jewish-American, Mr Roth found himself having to defend his writing against attacks from Jewish-Americans themselves. One of his harshest critics was a rabbi who would attack Roth's fiction during synagogue service.
Mr Roth always argued that through fiction, both writer and reader are freed from the rigid strictures that society imposes, and thus react to experiences in ways not allowed in daily conduct. He writes that being a novelist is different than being a PR man, and he responds to the rabbi by saying that as a writer, the axiom he follows is not "What will people think?" but "What do people think?" The writer frees his mind to move away from the traditional impositions of the community. In Reading Myself and Others, Mr Roth writes that being born a Jew for him was "morally demanding", "complicated", and as a result "interesting". Literary works for Mr Roth do not depend on how broad the range of the writer's representation is. He argues that the story of Abraham and Isaac is not a familial topic as not every Jewish father would be ready to plunge a knife into his son but it is still a crucial Biblical story. For a writer, what should be fundamental is the depth he unravels about whatever and whoever he has chosen to represent.
"Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life", he once mockingly stated. No other novel of his created the confusion and bewilderment like Operation Shylock in 1994. Critics had a ball attacking Mr Roth on the superficial dilemma he depicts in his novel amid the tragic Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The main protagonist, who is the author himself, lands in Israel after his cousin calls him to tell him that an impostor called Philip Roth, who Mr Roth later nicknames Moishe Pipik, was claiming that he was the writer of Portnoy's Complaint with the aim of advocating diasporism in Israel. Mr Roth soon finds himself in a tangle between the Mossad and the PLO.
At the end of Operation Shylock, Mr Roth inserts a disclaimer in which he states that the book is a work of fiction and that names, places, characters and incidents mentioned in the novel all stem from the author's fictive imagination. This is followed by a confounding statement, which says that this confession is "false". It is, as he once wrote, another instance of, "sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness are my closest friends".
What most readers find so compelling about Mr Roth is his phallocentric view combined with the Jewish-American predicament and man's fallen soul - in Mr Roth's case into bed. In Portnoy's Complaint, for instance, the protagonist is Newark-born and bred, 14-year-old Alex Portnoy, whose sex-fraught desires clash with the morals of his Jewish education and his mother's incessant breathing down his neck.
Mr Roth has recently admitted that a scene he witnessed at a friend's funeral had not only enthralled and fascinated him but also made him itch with envy. All the women his friend had met during his life were all present, weeping. Mr Roth said that such an event marks a man's life even after it has ended. For the author such a moment could never happen - his writing has engulfed his life.
Mr Roth's fiction, unlike that of most writers, is not an extension of his life, but like the title he chose for his 1978 novel, it is The Counterlife. He opted out of life and became a recluse for his fiction writing. Like Portnoy he is a "good" boy who wants to become "bad", fully aware that this can only happen through fiction. Enter Nathan Zuckerman, one of Mr Roth's main protagonists to whom he has dedicated nine novels.
Zuckerman is Mr Roth's alter ego, a writer as well as a bed-hopper, who serves Mr Roth's emotional and intellectual purposes without coddling into the autobiographical. Like Mr Roth, Zuckerman appears to be "a Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple, or an army, or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple", as Zuckerman states in The Counterlife.
Repeating to the brink of exhaustion that being Jewish-American was not a cause that led him to become a writer, as he was first and foremost a writer who also happened to be Jewish-American, Mr Roth found himself having to defend his writing against attacks from Jewish-Americans themselves. One of his harshest critics was a rabbi who would attack Roth's fiction during synagogue service.
Mr Roth always argued that through fiction, both writer and reader are freed from the rigid strictures that society imposes, and thus react to experiences in ways not allowed in daily conduct. He writes that being a novelist is different than being a PR man, and he responds to the rabbi by saying that as a writer, the axiom he follows is not "What will people think?" but "What do people think?" The writer frees his mind to move away from the traditional impositions of the community. In Reading Myself and Others, Mr Roth writes that being born a Jew for him was "morally demanding", "complicated", and as a result "interesting". Literary works for Mr Roth do not depend on how broad the range of the writer's representation is. He argues that the story of Abraham and Isaac is not a familial topic as not every Jewish father would be ready to plunge a knife into his son but it is still a crucial Biblical story. For a writer, what should be fundamental is the depth he unravels about whatever and whoever he has chosen to represent.
"Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life", he once mockingly stated. No other novel of his created the confusion and bewilderment like Operation Shylock in 1994. Critics had a ball attacking Mr Roth on the superficial dilemma he depicts in his novel amid the tragic Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The main protagonist, who is the author himself, lands in Israel after his cousin calls him to tell him that an impostor called Philip Roth, who Mr Roth later nicknames Moishe Pipik, was claiming that he was the writer of Portnoy's Complaint with the aim of advocating diasporism in Israel. Mr Roth soon finds himself in a tangle between the Mossad and the PLO.
At the end of Operation Shylock, Mr Roth inserts a disclaimer in which he states that the book is a work of fiction and that names, places, characters and incidents mentioned in the novel all stem from the author's fictive imagination. This is followed by a confounding statement, which says that this confession is "false". It is, as he once wrote, another instance of, "sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness are my closest friends".