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Special Issue on Philip Roth

Long before he received a Pulitzer Prize for his novel American Pastoral, Philip Roth was recognized as among the best novelists writing in English today. Where hitherto he had been bracketed with Bernard Malamud and Saul BeUow as one of America's leading Jewish American writers, the ethnic qualifier may now certainly be dropped. Not that Roth has stopped concerning himself with Jewish issues. In his latest novels his characters' Jewishness is still very much in evidence. But what Roth writes about them has more to do with their being Americans than being Jews. Perhaps that is one reason why the American Jewish "estabhshment" has ceased taking potshots at him. Another, possibly more important, reason may lie in the fact that American Jews have finally come of age as fully accepted in American culture. This more secure position has little need for the kinds of defensiveness that occasioned the attacks on Roth. Jewish Americans have arrived; they are now very much a part of mainstream America, as readers of Shofar hardly need telling. American Jews, such as those Roth now writes about, may be more or less - less rather than more, perhaps - aware of their Jewishness, but they are not as preoccupied by their ethnic origins as, say, Alexander Portnoy was in Portnoy 's Complaint. The essays in this special issue mostly focus on the later novels. Of course, the earlier work cannot be ignored, and it is not. Comparisons with what Roth did and what he is doing now are very much to the point. Many of the articles therefore refer usefully to the earlier fiction, showing how the later novels compare or contrast with it, or at times build on it, as Deborah Shostak's essay does, for example, in "Philip Roth's Fictions of Self-Exposure." On the other hand, a salient feature of Roth's recent writing is his continuing tendency to experiment. He seems to approach each new book as a challenge to explore the frontiers of fiction and to find new and different ways of treating relationships among biography, autobiography, and fiction. This collection begins, however, at the beginning - with an extended analysis of one of Roth's best short stories, "Eli the Fanatic." In her essay, Victoria Aarons investigates Roth's "registry" of Jewish consciousness in the conflict that arises in Eli Peck, a successful young lawyer living in the mythical New York suburb of Woodenton. His friends commission Eli, an assimilated Jew, to rid the town of the newly arrived yeshiva that threatens to disrupt the harmony established between the town's resident Jews and their WASP neighbors. Aarons shows that as Eli becomes obsessed with these parvenus, his obsession is shared by Roth's narrative voice as well. Eli's eventual inability to carry out his commission and his volte face - his assumption of Leo Tzuref s identity by putting on his Hasidic dress - reveals one modern American Jew's attempt to resolve the dilemma posed by assimilationism and the need to reclaim one's identity as something rooted in history. Few, if any, of Roth's later characters resolve their conflicts similarly, though many of them grapple with it, one way or another. Eli's obsession is prelude to a major theme that runs throughout Roth's fiction and that takes many forms: the nature of the self and the problem of self-identity. This theme is by no means unique in modern fiction; Gabe Wallach in Letting Go (1962) is not the first young man to set out in quest of self-discovery. But in this and increasingly in his later fiction Roth gives the theme some interesting twists as he introduces elements of his own autobiography into his novels. In Zuckerman Unbound (1985), he presents the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, whom he had introduced in My Life as a Man (1974) and in The Ghost Writer (1984), as a kind of facsimile of himself - the author of a notorious novel called Carnovsky that seems very much in substance and reputation like Roth's Portnoy 's Complaint. But as Deborah Shostak argues, Roth is here playing with autobiography, making the most of anticipated reader inclinations to interpret factually what is presented fictionally. …