The Philip Roth We Don't Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography by Jacques Berlinerblau

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Philip Roth We Don't Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography by Jacques Berlinerblau Hana Wirth-Nesher (bio) The Philip Roth We Don't Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography. By Jacques Berlinerblau. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021. 230 pp. Philip Roth's fate hangs in the balance as a celebrated and lauded American author whose work is increasingly interrogated for both misogyny and racism. Jacques Berlinerblau's book is exactly what we need right now. The Philip Roth We Don't Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography is neither an apologia nor a denunciation. It is a serious attempt to read Roth in light of #MeToo and #Black Lives Matter, as well as in light of his mercurial brilliance. Berlinerblau begins by framing his book within the contemporary tendency of "bringing the artist back in," so that literary works and other art forms are no longer processed as creations severed from the author's life (5). Immoral conduct by an author, therefore, is inevitably intertwined with aesthetics. Philip Roth's work is particularly compelling in the current moment, according to Berlinerblau, because his aesthetic signature of tearing down the wall between author and character actually parallels the core belief of # MeToo, but without the latter's "ethical investments" (12). Drawing a sharp line between the biographer's task and the literary critic's role, Berlinerblau describes his project as a "reverse biography" in which he peruses Roth's fiction for what he calls his "obsessional themes," which he reads back into his life (15–16). This is justified, he argues, because Roth himself repeatedly explored the interplay of autobiography and fiction. The book is divided into two parts, the first half examining sex, race, and autobiography in Roth's writing. In contrast to what he describes as a misguided perception that Roth depicted African Americans sympathetically, Berlinerblau demonstrates that both his non-Jewish and [End Page 307] Jewish characters repeatedly express bigoted views of blacks, that his nostalgic view of Newark is racist, and that his fictional Jews regard themselves as unambiguously white, in contrast to the more complex portrayals of race in the works of contemporaries like Grace Paley or Bernard Malamud. To draw conclusions about whether Roth's fiction is misogynist, Berlinerblau distinguishes among three Philip Roths: the "Real Roth" whose attitude toward women can be determined only by a biographer; the "Nexus Roth," who "loops his life into his fiction" and whose obsessive, vengeful depictions of his first wife dramatize his misogyny; and the "Page Roth," the "8500 fictional pages he composed" whose complexity makes it hard to pinpoint misogyny (65). Drawing on this structural model of the reading process reminiscent of Wayne Booth's New Critical separation of author from implied author and text, Berlinerblau chooses to focus on the text, on those extraordinary 8500 pages. After submitting ample evidence for the racism and misogyny in Roth's art in Part I, Berlinerblau devotes the second part of his book, "Roth Unsexed," to a compelling argument for preserving Roth's work from the threat of cancel culture. Roth's artistry, he argues, focuses primarily on the mutability of the self, both as theme and aesthetic strategy, in Roth's words "on the mystery of being alive and in flux" (80, from The Human Stain). Drawing on the sociologist Erving Goffman's dramaturgical approach to social interaction, Berlinerblau maps Roth's diverse dramatizations of self-reinvention, among them "The Looking Glass Self" (94), "the Impersonating Self" (96), "the Kinetic Self" (100), and the "Sloganizing Self" (104). For Roth, imagining selves in fiction who in turn imagine and perform counter selves provides the best route to self-knowledge. While praising the ingenuity of Roth's attempts to portray fiction as generating truth, Berlinerblau is skeptical about the results. "The author did not prove that reality is accessed through make-believe, but he did frame the problem with dash and daring," Berlinerblau writes (120). By conceding that Roth's fiction is at times complicit in the misogyny and racism of his time, Berlinerblau sets out to validate our engagement with Roth's ingenious, sophisticated and subtle treatment of post-modernist identity. On one hand, Berlinerblau's separation...