Rereading Roth

I’ve been rereading Philip Roth, and am reminded of the rewards of reading a gifted and challenging writer. What a profound pleasure reading Roth is!

It’s random really, this rereading of Roth. I’m not sure why I started exactly—except maybe it’s that I knew he had a new book coming out (Indignation—which is next on my TBR pile). Or that a new film, Elegy, based on one of his previous novels, The Dying Animal, was about to hit theaters.

It’s sort of like when I get a new album (I know I should say CD or digital download, but they’ll always be albums to me) of a singer/songwriter I love, and it makes me go back and listen to his (John Mellencamp) or hers (Jann Arden) or their (Gin Blossoms) entire catalog. But, it’s only sort of like that since I returned to the Roth catalog before getting his new novel or seeing the new film based on his older novel.

There are many, many albums in the Roth catalog. The prolific writer has been at it for several decades, and now, in his seventies, shows no signs of diminishment—in quantity or quality. From his extensive body of work, I’m choosing just two novels to recommend, and like all of his books, these are about the body—about sex and identity and mortality. And that’s what Roth does best—sex, death, and rock and roll (the last a stand-in for art).

The most recently published of the Roth novels I’ve been reading is Exit Ghost—his 28th book, and it appears, the final Zuckerman novel, which began with The Ghostwriter way back in 1979.

A 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after more than a decade in rural New England to visit a doctor about a prostate condition that has him incontinent and impotent. Within a few days of arriving in New York, Zuckerman encounters Amy Bellette, the muse of his beloved idol, the writer S.I. Lonoff. He also meets a young novelist and immediately begins using his writer’s imagination to fantasize about the young writer’s beautiful wife.

Sex, death, and art. Even when Roth’s protagonist can’t have sex, the book is still about sex, but it’s also powerfully and profoundly about death, as well—or more precisely, dying, the cruel process through which all is lost. All.

Speaking of dying, my second recommendation is The Dying Animal.

Again, all about sex and death, though unlike Exit Ghost, more about sex than death.

David Kepesh (of The Breast and The Professor of Desire), who left his wife and son during the sexual revolution vowing to indulge his erotic needs without encumbrance is now an eminent sixty-something-year-old cultural critic and lecturer at a New York college. The novel is the recounting of a devastating, all-consuming affair he’s had eight years prior with voluptuous 24-year-old Consuela Castillo, a former student of his. Obsessed with Consuela, driven mad by jealous desire and the “unavoidable poignancy” of their age difference, Kepesh’s erotic memoir is honest and humiliating and humanly, personally, tragic.

Other titles I highly recommend, but don’t have room to discuss here are The Human Stain and Goodbye Columbus.

If you haven’t read Roth, read him. If you have, do what I did—reread him. He will challenge and provoke you. Make you think and feel. His works of art will do what art is meant to do—enable you to explore some of the most essential elements of being human—of being a social, political, sexual, cultural, and ultimately dying animal.