Book News: Delving into the shaded world of Philip Roth

Philip Roth: A Counterlife

BY IRA NADEL

Oxford UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780199846108

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philip-roth-9780199846108?cc=us&lang=en&

This new biography of famed American novelist Philip Roth offers a full account of his development as a writer.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Philip Roth was much more than a Jewish writer from Newark, as this new biography reveals. His life encompassed writing some of the most original novels in American literature, publishing censored writers from Eastern Europe, surviving less than satisfactory marriages, and developing friendships with a number of the most important writers of his time, from Primo Levi and Milan Kundera to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow and Edna O'Brien. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize, Roth maintained a remarkable productivity throughout a career that spanned almost fifty years, creating 31 works. But beneath the success was illness, angst, and anxiety often masked from his readers. This biography, drawing on archives, interviews and his books, delves into the shaded world of Philip Roth to identify the ghosts, the character, and even identity of the man.

"In Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Ira Nadel exposes the multifaceted disposition of this major voice in American letters: Roth the realist, the ironist, the ventriloquist, the impersonator, the bard. In navigating the intricacies and dualities of the public and private Roth, Nadel shows the complexities, the contradictions, and the counterlives both lived and imagined. As literary sleuth, Nadel has enriched the myriad possibilities for understanding this exacting and defiant writer and his work." 

-- Victoria Aarons, O.R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature, Department of English, Trinity University

 

"Philip Roth: A Counterlife engages and illuminates the scenes of discontent, betrayal, illness, and rage in Roth's own life that allow for new understandings of his work and relationships. Drawing on such primary source material as interviews, personal correspondence, and site visits, Nadel's biography penetrates the carefully composed narrative Roth presented publicly in order to present a "counter" Philip Roth, one who is at once more sympathetic to his readers than critics realize and more dynamic than even his self-creation allows. Nadel seamlessly weaves his interpretations of Roth's most provocative texts into the story of Roth's own life: a life shadowed by pain, illness, and personal injustices, but also illuminated by the joys of writing, ideas, and friendships that will persist long after his death." 

-- Aimee Pozorski, co-executive editor of Philip Roth Studies, professor of English at Central Connecticut State University

Ira Nadel is professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and is the author of biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet and Leon Uris. He has also published Biography: Fiction Fact & Form, Joyce and the Jews and Modernism's Second Act, in addition to A Critical Companion to Philip Roth.