Roth delighted in every nuance and absurdity of Jewish life in the US, but his defiantly secular sensibility was without piety or reverence. He was a bestselling writer only once in his career, when Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) sold 420,000 copies in the first 10 weeks after publication.įrom his earliest work, Roth’s Jewish readers were uneasy with his ironic view of Jewish life. The big one – the Nobel prize in literature – eluded him, but there can be few American literary careers so richly laurelled, early and late. Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), sold a more than respectable 12,000 copies in hardback and received the National Book award. But there remained doubts, demands for clarification, as though he had not been writing literature after all, but committing a long, strained, perhaps not wholly candid act of self-revelation which merited the critics’ distrust.
He won intense respect from the moment in the 1960s when he joined Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud in a Jewish troika at the centre of American literature. I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide.” That half-defensive, angry note and a lifetime as a novelist crafting multiple “fake biographies”, gave Roth, who has died aged 85, an enigmatic status for tidy-minded critics. “I write fiction,” warned Philip Roth, “and I’m told it’s autobiography.
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