RIP Philip Roth

The prolific and much admired American writer Philip Roth died May 22, 2018, at the age of 85. He was often spoken of as a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. (I wonder if he might have done so this year, if it were not for the scandal that prevented any writer’s being chosen for this year, and now it is too late, as Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.) Although he did not win the Nobel, he received two National Book Awards, a Pulitzer, a Mann Booker Prize, several PEN awards, and many other prestigious recognitions of his work. He received a National Humanities Medal in 2010, presented by President Obama in the White House. He wrote 27 novels and four books of nonfiction. I, like so many, read, admired, and enjoyed his early books. At a certain point, though, I became more disinclined to read his novels because they were so heavily representative of a very male, very masculine viewpoint. On the one hand, I admire any thoughtful and truthful representation of human experience and thought, and I did and do admire Roth for portraying areas of male experiences and especially sexual behavior that were not much written about before by mainstream literary authors. I am not a prude, and am not offended at all by this. But as an individual female reader, I felt discouraged from continuing to read every novel he published. Still, I want to honor him as one of the great American writers of the mid-to-late twentieth century, often grouped with Saul Bellow and John Updike as the preeminent American writers of their time. I also acknowledge that he wrote about many themes besides male (heterosexual) sexuality, including some political and historical ones, as well as, in particular, about Jewish American life. Roth will be long remembered for his fearlessness as well as for his great gifts as a writer.