The Double, Comic Irony, and Postmodernism in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock

Abstract

Critics have praised Roth as one of the major Jewish American novelists, together with Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow. Reviewers often compare Roth's style to that of stand-up comic. His career has been summarized as starting in 1959 as comic realist, Theodore Dreiser meets Jackie Mason, and culminating in something much more postmodern, the deconstructionists meet Jackie Mason. Roth's early, realistic novels (Goodbye Columbus, 1959; When She Was Good, 1967; Portnoy's Complaint, 1969) and his political and social satires (Our Gang, 1971; The Great American Novel, 1973) are more traditional than his novels of the 80s and 90s (The Ghost Writer, 1979; Zuckerman Unbound, 1981; The Anatomy Lesson, 1983; The Prague Orgy, 1985; The Counterlife, 1987; Deception, 1990; Operation Shylock, 1993; Sabbath's Theater, 1995). The subject matter of the later novels is the comic handling of fictional systems themselves. Novels engage in postmodern experimentation with multiple narrators in terms of their comic consciousness of their own fictivity. These novels explore all possible ways of doing narrative, as well as the connection between the told and the teller (exhibiting Roth's playfully comic use of details from his own life and even the use of his own name, as in Deception and Operation Shylock). Roth's comedy and satire are often directed at Jews and their customs. His use of Jewish stereotypes for scathing humor has alienated and angered some members of the Jewish community shaken by the Holocaust. The eminent critic Irving Howe, in Philip Roth Reconsidered, called Portnoy's Complaint a vulgar book (77) and denounced Roth's shallow treatment of Jewish life. The essay set the tone for criticism by the Jewish citizenry, which was enraged by Roth's use of offensive traits for hyperbolic comedy, e.g., materialism in Goodbye Columbus; sexual preoccupation in Portnoy's Complaint; vitriolic quarreling in Operation Shylock; scandalous philandering in Sabbath's Theater.