After nearly thirty years, Philip Roth remains one of America's most controversial novelists, alternately lauded and derided by critics for his semiconfessional novels about the Jewish-American experience. Roth's latest work, excerpted in the following pages, has drawn the predictable fire but with more than the usual praise, too, for its ability to suggest that we all invent - knowingly or not - alternative destinies for ourselves, or counter-lives.
The spirited debate about Roth's literary merits has followed him since the publication of his first book, a collection of short stories entitled Goodbye Columbus (1959). While the collection received the National Book Award and the Jewish Council's Daroff Award, it was also denounced by Jewish leaders who objected to its unflattering portraits of Jewish characters. These attacks, which continued throughout the 1960s, reached a crescendo with the publication of Portnoy's Complaint in 1969, a hilarious caricature of coming-of-age in Jewish Newark. The novel was a phenomenon - a national best-seller that spawned cartoons, editorials, and angry denunciations.
Portnoy's Complaint was followed by three more comic extravaganzas - Our Gang, a scathing satire on the Nixon administration; The Great American Novel, a wild tall tale about baseball; and The Breast, a novel in which an English professor undergoes a Kafkaesque metamorphosis into a female breast. In My Life as a Man (1974), Roth introduced his fictional alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, the central character of his last five books: The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), Zuckerman Bound (1985), and The Counterlife
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