http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKAmXic-oCA
Hannah Gersen praises Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Roth Unbound, which is both a study of Philip Roth’s work and a kind of literary biography. Pierpont contends that “for a portrait of what occupied the majority of his time and thoughts — his fiction — I doubt there will be anything more revealing than this volume”:
[O]ne thing that makes Roth Unbound interesting is that Pierpont was able to interview Roth in the first years of his retirement. You can feel Roth’s reflective, relaxed state of mind as he looks back on his career, cataloging his regrets and triumphs. His regrets mostly fall in the realm of his personal life, most significantly his first marriage, which he believes held him back, emotionally and artistically, for most of his late twenties and early thirties, years Roth now views as lost. Another low point occurred in the late nineties, when his ex-wife, Claire Bloom, wrote a memoir that included a scathing account of her marriage to Roth. The memoir had, in Pierpont’s words, “a tremendous effect on Roth’s personal reputation — perhaps more than anything since Portnoy’s Complaint.”
Heller McAlpin notes the costs and benefits of a critique written by a declared admirer:
Pierpont dutifully — and defensively — addresses the accusations of anti-Semitism and misogyny that have shadowed Roth throughout his career, the latter amplified after the 1996 publication of his second wife Claire Bloom’s furious post-divorce memoir, Leaving the Doll’s House.
“It should be clear by now,” she comments, “that Roth, when attacked, prefers to goad rather than retreat: to make mischief, to get adrenaline flowing.” It often seems that he’s fueled by what Mickey Sabbath, his “deliberately abrasive and insanely funny” misanthropic character in Sabbath’s Theater, called the male hormone: “preposterone.”
In her enthusiasm, Pierpont occasionally goes over the top with “not since” pronouncements. “It’s possible that not since Proust has a writer so nearly captured Time,” she writes of Sabbath’s Theater. Or, more broadly: “Not since Henry James, it seems to me, has an American novelist worked at such a sustained pitch of concentration and achievement, book after book after book.” Which leaves me wondering: What about John Updike and Saul Bellow (both of whose relationships with Roth she considers at length)? Not to mention Joyce Carol Oates and E.L. Doctorow.
Cornel Bonca senses Roth hovering over the author’s shoulder, and suggests the book is “part of his attempt to preempt the rough treatment that his controversial career is likely to attract from future biographers”:
Most critical biographies of American writers don’t have the luxury to surge in appreciation toward the end: How many Americans, other than James (and maybe Pynchon?) have such great late periods to celebrate? Even the late novellas — certainly “Everyman” and “Exit Ghost” — have a distilled mastery that show none of the fall-off that’s apparent in, say, Bellow’s late novellas. The reason that Roth stuck with short forms in his last books and then decided to stop writing altogether is suggested in “Exit Ghost” — there [character Nathan] Zuckerman’s memory is so bad that he finds it increasingly tough to keep the details of a fictional narrative in his head, and Roth underlines this with Pierpont. Speaking of his disappointment with Bellow’s “Ravelstein,” he says “It’s hard to write a book at 84. It’s hard to remember from day to day what you’ve done.”
But having stopped writing doesn’t mean Roth is through. As terrific and independent a literary critic as Pierpont is, Roth has got his prints all over this book: In the end it feels like a joint effort to navigate the stormy seas of literary reputation and bring Roth home to the port of The American Canon. It certainly convinces me.
The Dish 