Upon Philip Roth’s sorta-kinda retirement announcement (my sense is that nothing’s final until everyone is dead) we have been treated to encomia online, and renewed calls that he be given a Nobel. I can’t help but notice that most of them are by men. Meanwhile, on Facebook, which seems to be emerging as the premier venue for “Thoughts I Am Not Willing to Have Twitter Fights With Total Strangers About,” most of the women I know registered anywhere from indifference to hatred on the scale.
It put me in mind of David Foster Wallace’s old classification of Roth as, with Updike and Mailer, one of the “Great Male Narcissists.” In the piece, Wallace cites this famous litany of insults from readers who are “mostly female,” directed at Updike but also, it struck me, applicable to Roth, if you bend that way:
“Just a penis with a thesaurus.”
“Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?”
“Makes misogyny seem literary the same way Limbaugh makes fascism seem funny.”
The piece has been hashed and rehashed by the likes of Katie Roiphe and the far more careful and insightful reader Elaine Blair, and I don’t want to dwell on it too much, not least because it’s really an Updike exorcism, not a Roth. But I’ve always had that “mostly female” stick in my craw. On the one hand I don’t have a problem with Wallace identifying the gender gap. On the other, his implication that it mostly takes the form of ad hominem on women’s part is disconcerting. Blair has a nicer way of putting it than that: “an amazingly frank expression of anxiety about female readers.”
Combine the gendered thing about Roth (to which there are surely exceptions) with the timing of the announcement and it’s all a little too… something. Sure, Roth gave up the ghost a week ago and it took awhile to surface because the American commentariat apparently doesn’t read French or Italian. But it hit the sidewalk in a week that began with political pundits braying about the need for demographic change in the Republican party, and ended on the release of a giant blockbuster film by and about these old “establishment” white guys.
I am still processing all of it, but it seems to me that while there may be a shift in butts-in-seats (or in the voting booth) political power, there still isn’t one in the matrices of higher cultural respect. It’s not that any individual here doesn’t deserve their acclaim when considered in a vacuum. I’m not a Roth fan but my antipathy doesn’t extend far enough to really critique him on literary grounds. And I’ve heard that Lincoln is good. It’s that, in the aggregate, the culture still imagines itself as moved and shaken by white men, and that lifts up their work in a way the rest of us… don’t quite enjoy.
I’m aware that pointing that out is considered mean or churlish or disrespectful (there’s that word again), and yet… it’s eating at me, today. So I do it anyway.
12 responses
“I’m not a Roth fan but my antipathy doesn’t extend far enough to really critique him on literary grounds. ”
ugh.
I suppose a better way of putting it might be: I don’t have the time or the will to overcome the dislike I’ve had of the bits I have read to spend enough time giving it a thorough pass through the wringer. There are so many other things to read! So many other classics I’ll never get to!
Interesting narrative, but Roth isn’t white. Seriously, he’s Jewish, 2nd or 3rd generation immigrant, not white, liberal, and really damn talented. (And, Updike, for that matter, was a giant Obama supporter, and most of his grand kids are mixed). If anyone in this scenario, aside from maybe you, is super overly grossly cheesily excessively white, it’s definitely the aspberger sufferer and self proclaimed pot addict, David Foster Wallace and his dearly departed bandana. (even if Infinite Jest and his short stories are great)
For the record, I was super excited about Obama winning too and, after 15 minutes of yelling whoo, high fiving people, and moonwalking; I went around soaking up the tears of Republican butthurt with excessive glee. However, your narrative is Fox News level lazy, your attempt to hang Roth announcing his retirement in a foreign paper weeks before the election on said election doesn’t make sense, you’re embarrassing me as an Obama volunteer, and making it a lot easier for people to attack us liberals as tone deaf.
P.S. I’m not trying to be mean or overly critical. It’s just that Roth isn’t white and his retirement is unrelated. (and his take on being a Jew, and what that meant in less tolerant times, and the discrimination that his family and others dealt with in America is pretty damn interesting)
P.S.S. As a further aside, Obama has said that Updike was one of his favorite authors, so I wouldn’t make too many assumptions about who resonates with who. Personally, I’ve read stuff by authors from pretty much every race and 50-100 countries that has resonated with me. The issue isn’t so much that certaint types of people aren’t being elevated to the level of Roth and Updike; the issue is that no one is being elevated to that level anymore. In academia (and among people who read), you will find authors of all types being thought of highly, but society as a whole just doesn’t care as much about books amymore, so a literary fiction author just isn’t going to reach the level of a Mailer/Roth/Updike/etc anymore.
“PS: I’m not trying to be mean” So, what, you’re just naturally that way? Probably why you like Roth. Rarely have I read another contemporary writer with such a pinched heart. Yes, he’s got a way with words sometimes, and if you can get past the hostility, he’s good for a laugh, but I’ve never been enlightened or inspired by or even enjoyed anything he wrote (and I had a couple of guys in my life who were homo-erotically in love with him, so I ended up reading his stuff, and listening to the praises of his stuff, and being “gifted” with his books for holidays, even though I told everyone I think he sucks, so I’m talking from the actual painful experience of having read him). There’s also that little problem of his being an overt misogynist, which means he was utterly incapable of compassionately globalizing the lessons he learned about privilege from being Jewish to apply it to other human beings if they did not have a penis. I’m going to guess one of the reasons DFW knew to criticize him and the other guys as Great Male Narcissists was because he was so familiar with the condition himself, which he openly admitted and famously warned others against, so criticizing him for it after he killed himself in part because he couldn’t escape it and had the decency to be upset by that is also mean.
In today’s American culture, Roth being Jewish doesn’t actually keep him from being white any more than my kids being Irish keeps them from being white. As for Updike, really, he has non-white grandkids, that’s supposed to be an argument for his being not so very white that he has to answer for the privilege that color afforded him?
If you’re not trying to be mean, I’ve got an idea for you, Jesse, don’t be mean. If Roth’s mom had effectively taught him that lesson, there would probably be fewer of us (male and female) who find his writing insufferable, regardless of his literary talents.
You didn’t address the bulk of what I said, so I don’t feel the need to respond to the additional unrelated points that you brought up comprehensively. Sometimes a person has to be a bit less than overly kind to say truthful things. So be it. Jewish isn’t white, and it certainly wasn’t in the 40’s. Though, I really do dare you to tell my Jewish relatives who were alive in the 40’s that it was no big thing. (or, on a less serious level, the ones living in small towns who constantly get messed with at school for it)
The narrative in the article above was lazy, illogical, and the type of thing that causes further division with no gain whatsoever. It doesn’t hang together, it doesn’t make sense, and it’s primarily an excuse for someone to crap on an author that they don’t like on principle, yet haven’t explored.
The fact that you critique artists on their niceness like art has a morality clause and most great artists wouldn’t rate pretty high on the asshole scale negates your artistic judgment. And, speaking of assholes, want to here something really white and really assholeish? Here’s David Foster Wallace on AIDS:
“AIDS’s gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all. This is a gift because human sexuality’s power and meaning increase with our recognition of its seriousness.â€
I don’t think that Roth has ever said anything that assholeish or white and, while I think that bringing in dead old ladies into it like you did particularly falls under your creed of niceness above all else, I would suggest that Wallace’s Mother and Father should have taught his white financially privileged ass a thing or two, but then, Wallace was a Reagan supporter, so what can you say?
*here=hear; there should be a comma before like art has a morality clause, after high on the asshole scale, and before and after like you did; and I’m sure that there are more typos in there somewhere.
Jesse, there’s probably something worthwhile in there somewhere, but it’s so buried in troll it’s impossible to find (much like Roth’s work), plus it’s beside the point. I never said I wasn’t trying to be mean.
Michelle, you make a sound argument about the culture still imagining itself as moved and shaken by white men, however it is that “white” is ultimately defined. It’s the perspective of privilege that is not black, not Latino, not LGBT, not poor, not Native American, not disabled, and invariably and without argument, not female. The fact that the immediate responses you received were negative and unapologetically rude only emphasizes how committed people are to holding onto that waning cultural paradigm, even when it’s not in their own best interest to do so. I’m guessing you’re saying making that point is supposed to be churlish because it’s like mentioning the pink elephant in the room, but if that elephant keeps sitting on everyone, pointing it out seems less an act of disrespect and more one of service to our mutual preservation. Thank you for doing so.
Funny. Yes, you totally got me. I’m a partially Jewish, partially Black, Roth reading, Obama campaign volunteering, troll. And, I totally said that you said that you weren’t trying to be mean. A good thing happened this week, Obama got elected; a bad thing happened too, an 80 year old writer decided that he was too senile to continue writing well; and I don’t think that conflating the two is a good victory dance for anyone. But you, you really get it, and you should tell everyone about the privilege that you lack and all of “us people” have.
I am a feminist, and as a feminist, I believe that women in general ought not be judged for their race or gender, and I believe that this principle also extends to men. If a particular person does something awful, fine, let’s identify and talk about it. But the nonstop marshaling of all white men into the category “white men” shuts down conversation. It doesn’t open it up. Let us deal with persons as persons rather than as members of groups, toward the end of all persons being dealt with as persons, rather than as members of groups.
As an aside, while the majority of white people voted for Romney, the majority of Obama’s voters were white. People can take that however they want, but I personally take it as a good and powerful thing.
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