Philip Roth: Portnoy's Complaint and American Pastoral author dies aged 85.

Pedro_P

Chronicler of American politics, Jewishness and male sexual desire was widely regarded as one of greatest novelists of the 20th century.
︴
︴

‘The audience I’m writing for is me’ … Philip Roth, who has died aged 85. Photograph: Eric Thayer/Reuters

▼ The novelist Philip Roth, who explored America through the contradictions of his own character for more than six decades, died on Tuesday aged 85.
Roth’s career began in notoriety and ended in authority, as he grappled with questions of identity, authorship, morality and mortality in a series of novels that shaped the course of American letters in the second half of the 20th century. He refracted the complexities of his Jewish-American heritage in works such as Portnoy’s Complaint, American Pastoral, The Human Stain and The Plot Against America, which garnered both critical and commercial success, garlanding their creator with a dazzling succession of literary prizes.
Roth’s death was confirmed by his literary agent, Andrew Wylie, who said the author died on Tuesday night of congestive heart failure. His biographer, Blake Bailey, said on Twitter that Roth died surrounded by friends.
Blake Bailey(@BlakeBaileyOn)
Philip Roth died tonight, surrounded by lifelong friends who loved him dearly. A darling man and our greatest living writer. pic.twitter.com/v01QkXi7wD
May 23, 2018
Roth found success and controversy in equal measure with his first collection of short stories, Goodbye Columbus, published in 1959. In it, he followed the fortunes of middle-class Jewish Americans caught between the old ways and the new, negotiating the boundaries between assimilation and differentiation in suburbia. It was enough to win him a National Book Award, and to unleash a stream of condemnation from those who labelled him antisemitic, a “self- hating Jew”.
The publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 transformed him from enterprising young author to scandalous celebrity. An immediate bestseller, the wildly comic monologue charts the life of Alexander Portnoy as he pursues sexual release through ever more extreme erotic acts, held back only by the iron grip of his Jewish American upbringing. For some, the temptation to take this confessional novel as a novelised confession proved too great. Writing Portnoy was easy, he  told the Guardian in 2004– but he “also became the author of Portnoy’s Complaint and what I faced publicly was the trivialisation of everything”.

Philip Roth pictured in 1968 revisiting Newark, his childhood home. Photograph: Bob Peterson/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty
His response to what his editor Aaron Ascher called “the nightmare of a smash hit” was to retreat into literary fiction, exploring the possibilities of the novel in books such as political satire Our Gang, and the Kafkaesque sexual fable, The Breast. Between 1972 and 1977, he travelled regularly to Czechoslovakia, making friends with blacklisted writers such as Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, and confronting the difference between what he called the “private ludicracy” of being a writer in the US and the “harsh ludicrousness of being a writer in eastern Europe” behind the Iron Curtain. He met the English actor Claire Bloom in 1975, and as she became almost a muse for Roth, he began to divide his time between London and New York.
Through alter egos Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh, Roth began to examine the connection between an author and his work, with Zuckerman, who first appeared in My Life as a Man, gradually becoming the author’s closest avatar. Born in the same year as Roth, to a Jewish couple living in New Jersey, the unforgiving, goatish Zuckerman also found notoriety with a feverish monologue recounting the energetic sex life of a Jewish American man. Through Zuckerman, Roth grappled with the problems of fame, literature and his Jewish identity f in a sequence of five novels, from 1979’s The Ghost Writer to 1986’s The Counterlife, which bound the life of his fictional creation ever closer to that of his creator.
Roth treated critics who struggled to locate the boundary between life and fiction in his work with disdain, intoning “it’s all me ... nothing is me”. He  rejected the description of his  characters as alter egos, maintaining that “none of those things happened to me ... it’s imaginary”. The characterisation of his work as “autobiographical” or “confessional” he took almost as an insult to his abilities as a writer, suggesting to the French writer Alain Finkielkraut that to do so was “not only to falsify their suppositional nature but … to slight whatever artfulness leads some readers to think that they must be autobiographical”. For Roth,the acting out of a role was the fun part of a life spent constructing what he called a “half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life”.

Philip Roth with Claire Bloom in 1990. Photograph: Ian Cook/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
1990 marked the beginning of a new phase both in Roth’s fiction and his life, with his marriage to Bloom and the publication of Deception, a novel about a married writer called “Philip Roth” who conducts an affair with an Englishwoman. This provoked a crisis with Bloom, who declared in a memoir published in 1996 that she “no longer gave a damn whether these girlfriends were erotic fantasies”, and sent Roth into a depression. The couple were divorced four years later, and Roth retreated to pursue an ascetic existence away from the distractions of fame in a Connecticut farmhouse (▪ ▪ ▪)

► Read the full note here: Source

temujin

Buddha480

An atheist but wrote movingly about belief and faith