A Political Companion to Philip Roth

Abstract

A Political Companion to Philip Roth Maggie McKinley (bio) Claudia Franziska Brühwiler and Lee Trepanier, eds. A Political Companion to Philip Roth. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017. xi+284 pp. $60.00. Philip Roth has always had a fraught relationship with his own public role, particularly with regards to politics. He has been famously resistant to any kind of politicized label, from his chagrin at being categorized as a "Jewish American Writer" to his reluctance to accept the title of "Public Intellectual." He has also pushed back against those who would interpret some of his work as a symbolic commentary on contemporary politics: for example, when The Plot Against America was published in 2004 and was promptly read as a critique of the second Bush administration, Roth asserted that he wrote the novel "not so as to illuminate the present through the past but to illuminate the past through the past" ("The Story"). Yet Roth has never been able to completely distance himself or his writing from the political realm: as recently as January 2017, in fact, in an email about the perils of the Trump administration published in the New Yorker, Roth alluded to a political responsibility unique to writers. As he wrote, "I imagine writers will continue robustly to exploit the enormous American freedom that exists to write what they please, to speak out about the political situation, or to organize as they see fit" (Thurman). A Political Companion to Philip Roth confronts this conundrum of sorts, acknowledging Roth's reluctance to make fiction political while also exploring the way politics seems inextricable from Roth's writing. Indeed, the collection opens with Roth's published remarks for the 2013 PEN Literary Gala, wherein he uses his platform to criticize the government and attendant censorship he encountered in Prague in the 1970s. Each contributor thereafter deftly navigates Roth's caginess about politics, examining manifestations of political themes in his work while justly refusing to pin Roth down to any one political ideology or dogma, likely mindful of his remark that while so many forces in society attempt to "persuade, tempt, and control," readers "come to fiction to be free of all that noise" (Lee 186). [End Page 94] One of the merits of the collection is the way that it highlights the many variant ways the term "politics" itself can be understood across Roth's body of work. In doing so, it demonstrates a refreshing breadth of approaches and methodologies, likely arising from the fact that the contributors hail from a range of disciplines and draw from diverse areas of expertise. For example, Aimee Pozorski engages with trauma theory to argue that I Married a Communist "offers a politics of listening" (16) that "becomes the most effective form of engagement" (21). Michael Festl applies a methodology of political philosophy to the American Trilogy, finding pathologies in each novel that prevent Roth's characters from becoming reconciled to an American value system. Louis Gordon addresses the conflicting views on Zionism offered by different characters in The Facts, The Counterlife, and Operation Shylock, highlighting the dialogism that defines Roth's work. Andy Connolly explores politics of race and class in The Human Stain. Till Kinzel, Yael Maurer, and Debra Shostak all investigate various iterations of the politics of the body: Kinzel connects physical suffering in "Novotny's Pain" to the problems of American democracy; Maurer explores the relationship between the male body and political anxiety; and Shostak investigates gender politics in an array of Roth's novels, focusing primarily on the men but also devoting an intriguing and much-needed "coda" to Roth's less-discussed female characters. While each chapter offers a valuable contribution to the discussion of Roth and politics, there are some particular highlights that ground the collection, delivering especially focused readings of the political dimensions of Roth's writing and drawing together elements of surrounding essays. For example, Claudia Brühwiler's essay mines Roth's writing and biography for evidence of his role as a public intellectual, and her piece provides a throughway of sorts for ensuing essays to engage more deeply with political themes in Roth's individual works. In "The Politics of...