Philip Roth is a singular figure in recent American fiction: he is a social realist who adamantly refuses to withdraw from the field, even though he sees around him no smiling aspects of American life. Taking as his domain the recognizable present, Roth has been the most prolific—and the most controversial—writer in America in the last decade and a half. His immense popularity in the universities and the marketplace has raised appreciative eyebrows and elicited cries of outrage, in some cases both at the same time. Irving Howe reveals the ambivalence that Roth's fiction typically generates when he says, "His reputation has steadily grown these past few years, he now stands close to the center of our culture (if that is anything for him to be pleased about)," and "we are in the presence not only of an interesting writer but also of a cultural 'case'" [see CLC, Vol. 2].
Roth's wonderfully rich and varied works—the sharp-edged and well-crafted stories in the Goodbye, Columbus collection (1959), the gloomily realistic Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967), the serio-comic Portnoy's Complaint (1969), the fabulistic The Breast (1972), the satiric Our Gang (1971) and The Great American Novel (1973), the candidly autobiographical My Life As a Man (1974)—illustrate important insights into America's cultural predicament as Roth sees it from his own vantage point: up close and personal, as the television commentators say. No other living writer has so rigorously and actively attempted to describe the destructive element of experience in American life—the absurdities and banalities that impinge upon self-realization in this "The Land of Opportunity and the Age of Self-Fulfillment" (as David Kepesh in The Breast says). And no other writer so clearly bridges the buoyant optimism of Jewish-American writers of the fifties and the dark, despairing world view of such recent writers as John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, Anthony Burgess and Jerzy Kosinski. Yet Roth is more often than not dismissed as a cultural "case," as if that explained away the variety and vision of his fiction or mitigated the acute embarrassment that accompanies the spectacle of brash young soldiers obstinately continuing in losing battles.
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