Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition

Abstract

Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition Jacques Berlinerblau (bio) Andy Connolly. Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017. 292 pp. $105.00. Donald J. Trump's ascension to the presidency of the United States might be seen as the exclamation point on an American liberal tradition sentenced to decades of decline. Philip Roth never sought to predict or explain that decline. Still, a few of his major novels offer insights into the challenges, tensions, and instabilities that have roiled this political philosophy—a political philosophy that most, but certainly not all, American Jews have embraced with passion since the New Deal. Andy Connolly's Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition seeks to make sense of the author's interrogation of liberalism by focusing on the American Tetralogy (i.e., American Pastoral, 1997; I Married a Communist, 1998; The Human Stain, 2000; The Plot Against America, 2004), and Exit Ghost (2007). Connolly opens by discussing one of Roth's thematic obsessions: the contradiction between trying to produce art unsullied by the vicissitudes of life and the manner in which those vicissitudes sully all artistic production. These lengthy discussions of Nathan Zuckerman's formalist/New Critical pretensions are learned, yet not immediately germane to the subject of political liberalism. Too, it is hard for scholars to break much new ground on this issue. When it comes to how the artist processes experience, Roth usually beats his critics to the punch; he has relentlessly—and recursively—canvassed every inch of this dilemma in works like My Life as a Man (1974) and The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988). Roth's musings on liberalism, however, are far less picked over by either the author or his critics. It is here where Connolly's work stands to make an original contribution. Following the lead of earlier scholars, Connolly sets his analysis of I Married a Communist within the context of the "New York Intellectuals." The latter broke with the stridency of Communist views, in favor of a "more tame politics of centrist liberalism" (62). Their thinking about art and its relation to politics bears affinities with the views of New Critics. It is in [End Page 97] this crisscross between New Critics and New York Intellectuals that Connolly situates Nathan Zuckerman and Murray Ringold's dialogue. Their epic conversation is about "the fate of progressive politics in post-war American life" and "the struggle for relevance of literary culture during this period" (62). Like Murray, the New York Intellectuals rejected Communism's adulation of the collective, its facile moralizing, and its tidy historical schemata. For these thinkers, art revealed a different truth, a sovereign truth, and a truth truer than the one coughed out by materialist meta-narratives. Murray thus appears as an avatar of the "unimpassioned, self-scrutinizing, and yet still morally engaged liberal" (80). Leo Glucksman (Nathan's cape-clad instructor and would-be seducer) similarly espouses such ideas, passionately rejecting any art placed in the service of political expedience. Connolly is more cautious about pinning down Zuckerman's relation to the New Critics/New York Intellectuals. After all, the novelist's own encounter with crypto-Communist Ira Ringold was, initially, one of admiration and discipleship. It was from Ira that Nathan learned that art must "enshrine the struggles of the embattled" (Communist 38). Connolly's most inspired readings occur in his discussion of American Pastoral. This novel's engagement with Vietnam-era politics helps us understand how American Jewish political sympathies were soon to be fractured across not two, but three lines. The decade fomented New Left radicals, such as Merry Levov, who reacted with violence to the New Deal status quo favored by their liberal elders. Yet the tumultuous 1960s is also the decade in which the seeds of Jewish neoconservatism were planted. Connolly cleverly parses Swede Levov as an example of a "de-vitalized center" and a harbinger of a Jewish shift to the Right (Connolly 120). Levov's unthinking nostalgia for America augurs the cheap nationalism of later Red State patriots. His decision to move the Newark Maid factory out of the country for cheaper labor foreshadows neoliberal economic policies. His abandonment...