Getting People Wrong: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Philip Roth's Passing

Abstract

Getting People WrongSome Preliminary Thoughts on Philip Roth's Passing Matthew Shipe (bio) A few weeks after Philip Roth's death this past May at the age of 85, I was invited to participate in a podcast hosted by fellow Roth Society member Danny Anderson. He had invited me on his show, The Sectarian Review, to discuss Roth's long and distinguished career and speculate on his ultimate impact on American literary culture. I had never done a podcast before and have always been apprehensive about the platform—when using it, I always recall that bit in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) when a Skype-like invention creates a sort of national existential crisis as people become painfully self-conscious and purchase attractive mannequins to be their stand-ins for video chats. Nevertheless, I was more than happy to talk about Roth with Danny and his other guest Michial Farmer, a friend I had met through Updike circles.1 For around two hours we bandied about our favorite bits of Roth's work and somehow tried to solidify our thoughts on what his fiction had meant to us. Midway through the podcast, Danny and I recalled the Roth@80 event, laughing at the memory of finding ourselves in a room with Don DeLillo, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Lethem, Louise Erdrich, and, of course, Roth himself, without a drink anywhere in sight. The night was somewhat surreal—it felt a little bit like being thrust, sober and slightly underdressed, into a Fellini film.2 I do remember managing to nudge myself in line behind Don DeLillo as he ordered a Sprite.3 I think I ordered one too hoping that I might impress him (shockingly, the gesture wasn't noticed). At the end of that night, I made my way to the front of the room to talk with Roth—again, I'd like to reiterate that this would have been the type of event where a drink (or two) would have been very handy. It was my one time to meet Roth: I can't remember what I had told him—something fairly generic about how much his work had meant to me—but I'm grateful that I was able to tell him this and he was gracious in our brief conversation. As I was finishing up, some family [End Page 130] friends approached and a flurry of pictures were taken. I like to believe that I'm in the back of one of those photos, an unidentified curly-haired mystery man never to be identified in some Roth family photo book. After sharing stories of that night, Danny asked us to read aloud our favorite passage from Roth's fiction as a way to wrap up the conversation. While there are countless passages I could have selected, the choice for me was fairly easy. I turned to my well-worn copy of American Pastoral (1997), the novel that was my first real introduction to Roth when I was an undergraduate back in the late '90s. I qualify it as my "real introduction" because I know I had read a few of the stories in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) while in high school—we did "Defender of the Faith" and maybe "Eli the Fanatic" sometime during my senior year—but I had not really experienced Roth until American Pastoral was assigned in Professor Marshall Boswell's junior seminar titled "The Literature of Replenishment."4 That course, more than anything, propelled me down the Roth rabbit hole. After the semester, I snatched up a remaindered copy of Sabbath's Theater (1995), and soon after found myself quickly making my way through much of Roth—zipping through the first Zuckerman trilogy after graduation, reading Letting Go (1962) after my first year in grad school,5 and then tackling The Human Stain (2000) the summer after it had been released as I was recovering from that first year in grad school. I confess I didn't pick up Portnoy's Complaint (1969) until much later in my Roth reading, and I still haven't read When She Was Good (1967), a lapse that I was loudly called out on by students...