Philip Roth in his 40s.

Philip Roth was born in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood in the industrial city of Newark, New Jersey, in 1933. His grandparents had fled Galicia (a region between today’s Poland and Ukraine) in the late 19^thcentury, escaping anti-Semitic persecution like hundreds of thousands of Jews at that time in Russia and eastern Europe. His family was not religious; young Philip never learnt more Hebrew than was necessary for his Bar mitzvah, but he did learn a bit of Yiddish – which is perceptible in many of his novels, either explicitly or in more subtly hybrid patterns of speech commonly referred to as Yiddishisms.

The Roths belonged to the lower middle-class, and young Philip had a happy “all-American” youth, preserved from deprivation or anti-Semitism, and these happy memories he often returned to in his novels with a degree of ambivalence, given the fates of European Jews during the same period. This would generate a central theme in several of his books (as in the works of many other minority authors): the tension between mainstream American culture and the heritage of immigrant communities, the conflicting feelings in younger generations between the desire to fit in and embrace modernity, and misgivings about betraying the heritage of their fathers.

Roth studied literature at university, then taught it, along with creative writing. He was at first a great admirer of the Western masters of realism, notably Henry James and Gustave Flaubert; then, in a second stage in his formative years, his interest turned to Jewish-American novelists (especially Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow), as well as Jewish comedians, who were becoming more and more popular in the 1950s and 1960s (Henny Youngman, Lenny Bruce, etc.), and whose shticks (Yiddish for a comical “gag” or “bit”) he subtly integrated to his own writing style.

Roth’s published his first book, a collection of short stories entitled Goodbye, Columbus, in 1959. It was a critical and commercial success, but it also stirred the sort of controversies that marred much of the author’s career: a majority of the stories being satires of the Jewish-American middle-class, some accused Roth of feeding anti-Semitic stereotypes, even of being a “self-hating Jew”. These accusations became more vitriolic in 1969, when Roth published his best-known novel Portnoy’s Complaint, a clownish, sexually-explicit satire about a neurotic, priapic young New York Jew obsessed with his overbearing mother, and written in the form of a monologue to the protagonist’s psychoanalyst.

All through the 1960s and 1970s, Roth also wrote essays about the deteriorating state of American culture, notably under the impact of consumerism, and about politics; a lifelong Democrat, he was a particularly fierce critic of Richard Nixon and the Republican Party. He also worked as a publisher, and was instrumental in the popularization of Eastern European writers like Milan Kundera, one of his closest friends, in the US.

In the late 1970s, Roth’s work took a meta-fictional turn, when he gave birth to his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who was to be the protagonist of nine of his novels. The latter include:

– the 4 novels in the tetralogy Zuckerman Bound (a nod to Percy B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound), fictionalizing part of Roth’s life and literary career, notably the polemics associated to Goodbye, Columbusand Portnoy’s Complaint, and offering a broad, fascinating reflection on the state of literature and authorship in the post-war era, as well as the complex mechanisms of literary inspiration – a sort of comical, American Contre-Sainte Beuve, as it were.

– The Counterlife (1987), probably Roth’s most skilfully postmodernist novel, focusing on the “Jewish condition” in the United States, Israel and England.

– the “American Trilogy” (1997-2000), comprising 3 novels (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain) which follow the history of the American left since World War Two. Since that time, Roth’s work evolved towards a more sombre, elegiac mood.

A lot of Roth’s novels, as has been said, drew from his personal experience and openly fictionalized well-documented episodes in his biography, making him one of the most interesting examples of the ambiguous genre of “auto-fiction”, a notion coined by the French writer Serge Doubrovsky and studied by the French critic Vincent Colonna in Autofictions & autres mythomanies littéraires (2004). The best examples of autofictions in Roth’s work are probably his pseudo-autobiography The Facts (1988) and, his picaresque parody of a spy novel Operation Shylock (1993). Towards the end of his writing career, Roth also turned to dystopian literature in The Plot Against America (2004), a counter-factual auto-fiction reimagining what his life might have been as a child had the former aviator Charles Lindbergh won the 1940 presidential election against FDR, and set up a fascist regime in the United States. In 2019, the novel was adapted as a mini-series by David Simon – the creator of the TV classic The Wire – on HBO, and is worth seeing; many, of course, including Simon, have interpreted the novel as Roth’s prefiguration of Trumpism.)

Roth died in 2018, having risen to the status of “grand old man” of American literature in the two previous decades, revered for the virtuosity of his prose, his brilliantly accurate sense of social realism and irresistible black humour.