“The Book of My Life is a Book of Voices”: Philip Roth and the Bloodlines of his Fiction

Abstract

"The Book of My Life is a Book of Voices"Philip Roth and the Bloodlines of his Fiction Catherine Morley (bio) The brio, the punch, the vigor, and the rich, rude tang of Philip Roth's writing have, of course, been well documented. In the innumerable news features after his death, critics, scholars, and friends reflected on the frenetic pace of his writing, as well as the humor, the vitriol, and the anger that informed his work. And surely not even the most skeptical reader can deny that Roth's prose throbs with a uniquely caustic and savage energy, which, as his friend David Hare has observed, was directed towards skewering hypocrisy wherever he saw it. For me, though, the appeal of Roth's writing lies not just in its vigor and energy, but in its depth, its sophistication, its moral and historical profundity. People often describe his books as angry, funny, sexy, or moving; but I think the lifeblood of Roth's work is more than just an abiding wrath or lustiness. Rather it is his sustained engagement, throughout his career in fiction, with his ancestors, literary or otherwise. This energy manifests itself in two ways: in the raft of literary influences to which he was never shy of admitting, and in the various representations of characters who assess their lives in terms of those who have formed them.1 The first of these manifestations is nowhere more evident than in the book in which I first encountered Roth's distinctive voice, I Married a Communist (1998). Contemplating his life and the friendships that have formed him, an older Nathan Zuckerman reflects: What is it, this genealogy that isn't genetic? In my case they were the men to whom I apprenticed myself […] [. . .] I became Leo's willing student, and through his intercession, Aristotle's willing student, Kierkegaard's willing student, Benedetto Croce's [End Page 98] willing student, André Gide's willing student, Joseph Conrad's willing student, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's willing student [. . .] [. . .] the book of my life is a book of voices. (217, 221, 222). It goes without saying, of course, that Zuckerman's sense of the multilayered intellectual ancestry informing his existence applies to Roth, too. And indeed, what immediately greets us when we open any of his books or short stories is a cacophony of voices, from Sheldon Grossbart's insinuations of brotherhood to Peter Tarnopol's feeling that his migraines give him a kinship with Virginia Woolf, from Merry Levov's revelatory stammer to the jump rope songs of Newark children's voices in Nemesis (2010). Every story teems with voices; every life is layered upon or shaped by relation to another; every text is buttressed by an intricate lattice of palimpsests. One of Roth's abiding themes is the way in which we are shaped, for good or ill, consciously or unconsciously, by those around us: our friends, our communities, our families, our ancestry. A marvelous example comes in the story "Defender of the Faith," from the Goodbye, Columbus (1959) collection, which explores the relationship between Sergeant Nathan Marx and Lieutenant Sheldon Grossbart, retrospectively recalled by the older man. Nathan Marx, a hardened soldier (albeit also a thinker and scholar, in the very familiar Rothian combination of the intellectual and physical selves), finds himself in a training camp in Missouri in 1945, shocked to discover that he is a survivor of the war and annoyed by the overtures of an over-confident younger recruit who assumes an affinity between them, and cadges favors on the basis of their shared faith. As a thoroughly assimilated American Jew, Marx is forced to consider what he has sacrificed in pledging his allegiance to Uncle Sam. Throughout the story, he presents himself as having developed "an infantryman's heart" (149) and rejects the attempts of Grossbart and his companions to establish a personal relationship. However, as he watches three Jewish personnel walking to their prayers, Marx yields to the gentle touch of memory: I could hear Grossbart singing the double-time cadence, and as it grew dimmer and dimmer it suddenly touched some deep memory—as did the slant of light—and I was remembering the shrill...