Confronting the “C” Word: Cancer and Death in Philip Roth's Fiction

Abstract

I wanted this to be saddest thing I'd ever written.-Michael Faber, 2014In September of 2014, Scottish author Michael Faber retired from writing fiction just after publishing his latest novel, The Book of Strange New Things. Although he originally envisioned it as a work of science fiction, it became more tied to realities of everyday life when Eva, his wife and partner of 26 years, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. As Faber reflected in an interview for The New York Times: Once Eva was ill, I had these huge wellings of sadness, but also this sense of preciousness of human life while we have that gift, and that fed into book as well [....] Ultimately, story invites you to feel gratitude for this vehicle that fixes itself. One of cruel ironies of course is that Eva had a disease that didn't fix itself (Alter).The retirement of Faber shocked writing community, much like retirement of Philip Roth just a few years earlier. While Faber is less known and less prolific than Roth, both men share a desire to capture preciousness of human life by writing story of a woman dying of cancer. While Eva was very real spouse behind Faber's novel, Roth too has lost women he loved to cancer, most specifically Janet Hobhouse, a very close friend, and Veronica Geng, his long time publisher (Pierpont 281). The resulting books depicting cancer of women indeed feel like the saddest thing ever written, to draw on Faber's likely allusion to famous opening line of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915), a novel which also features tragically premature death of a woman.For many readers, it's not surprising that women and an unspeakable c word might be linked in Philip Roth's fiction. Yet I have in mind is not vulgar; it is cancer. This illness, which strikes characters such as Drenka Balich, Consuela Castillo, and Amy Bellette, has been considered too little in Roth's fiction. Rather than discuss Roth's apparent misogyny, often a frame used to read his work, I argue that his characters with cancer, especially vibrant women of Sabbath's Theater (1995), The Dying Animal (2001), and Exit Ghost (2007), reveal an artistic understanding of women that is more ethical than objectifying, more humane than sexually predatory. Such a reading, I hope, not only defends Roth against charge of misogyny, but also casts him in a fully ethical light: by shifting our focus from one c-word to another- from so often focus in reading Roth's fiction, to cancer-we can see more about Roth's approach to women and indeed, humanity, in general.Over course of Roth's writing about cancer, we might further trace a trajectory in his evolving sense of ethical relation. Whereas Sabbath's Theater takes as its focus mourning of Mickey Sabbath in wake of his loss of Drenka, The Dying Animal depicts recognition that mourning is actually a betrayal of dying other, and Exit Ghost ultimately emphasizes ways in which such diseases point up unreliability of a narrator when grappling with traumatic recognition of mortality of a loved one. My readings of these three novels make a central claim for how Roth's representation of women with cancer attests to a moral vision that has often been overlooked by readers, precisely because they have misread his view of radical otherness to obtain only in sexualized and objectifying terms that other c word, cunt, implies.Each of these novels features a man who dies (Morty Sabbath, George O'Hearn, George Plimpton), a foil who facilitates Roth's protagonist's confrontation with his own death; but there is always a woman who dies of cancer, too. Why have these women been so overlooked, secondary, considered by readers solely as a sexual distraction? For me, they ought to become focal point, a collective voice, even a chorus requiring of us that we confront cancer that is simultaneously at center of these books and omnipresent in our lives. …