Newark Revisited: A Philip Roth for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Newark RevisitedA Philip Roth for the Twenty-First Century Michael Kimmage (bio) Philip Roth died in the second year of the Trump presidency. He was a critic of the new president in sharper terms than he had been of George W. Bush or even Richard Nixon, whose shadow falls across a number of Roth's novels. Apart from Roth's opposition to the Vietnam War, to which he devoted a small portion of his literary celebrity—his name, as it were—Roth was never an overtly political writer or an overtly political man. He was an FDR Democrat, and in this he was his father's son. That made him, as he surely knew, somewhat uninteresting as an American writer. It would have been interesting if he had, like John Updike, come out in favor of the Vietnam War. It would have been interesting if he had been a Marxist or a Zionist or a neoconservative. There is no political destiny for an American writer less gripping intellectually and culturally than to be centrist Democrat. For this reason, Roth had a political profile that almost erased itself. As times goes by, his boring political profile is likely to be erased from the memory of his life and career. As Roth himself would have been the first to argue, he should be remembered for his literature, for his many books, and not for the political positions he took in public or in private. Yet it would be a mistake to place politics on one side of Roth's critical reception and literature on the other. It would be an even worse mistake to do so in the wake of the Trump presidency, which has altered the texture of American politics and which has issued from an alteration in the texture of American politics. To these alterations Roth's literature has much to say. Events can occasion the rediscovery or rethinking of an existing body of literature—the Nixon presidency, for example, that made Roth think he was living in Kafka's America (see his 1974 essay "Our Castle"); or the reappearance of Moby-Dick in the 1930s after decades of callous neglect, just in time for Captain Ahab to accompany the fascist dictators leading their respective Pequods into the abyss. The Plot Against America has proven itself [End Page 79] a major novel of the Trump era, from which it will be forever inseparable as gloss and as prophecy, despite having been published in 2004. At least as rich is Roth's so-called American Trilogy and through it his literature of place, of de-industrialization, of American decay—in a word, his literature of Newark, New Jersey. This was the anti-celebratory fiction Roth fashioned in a decade far more hospitable to self-celebration. Finally, Roth's sense of himself as a civic writer and his sense of his novels as civic in nature and effect bears directly on the fractures and divisions of the Trump era. Roth's books are a meditation on a nation's story conceived in the glow of World War II patriotism and carried a bit beyond the end of the twentieth century. This meditation is frozen in time. It ceased with Roth's death in May 2018, but because it took shape in literature and is alive with the life of its readers, Roth's meditation is also ongoing. It evolves every time his books are read in real time. ________ Upon publication, The Plot Against America was misread as an exposé of the Bush administration. The misreading assumed it to be a roman à clef in which the Charles Lindbergh who assumes the presidency in place of Franklin Roosevelt represented George W. Bush. Indeed, this could only have been a misreading of Roth's counter-factual novel. Charles Lindbergh was famously an isolationist. He was an anti-Semite, a harsh opponent of FDR, and an American who was partial to the National Socialists in Germany, who in turn regarded him as the beau ideal of the Aryan hero. (Hermann Goering owed his ascent within the Nazi movement to his celebrity status as a World War I pilot.) The historical Lindbergh and the one...