I read “Portnoy’s Complaint” before “The Plot Against America.” Only after the second did I understand the first
As a middle-class Jewish American man, I was very much the type of person that Philip Roth wrote about — and for.
Despite this demographic reality, Roth — who died of congestive heart failure on Tuesday night at the age of 85 — only wrote two books that ever managed to find their way onto my desk. One of them was an assignment, the other a lark, and perhaps appropriately, I wound up hating the assigned book and loving the one that I chose on my own druthers.
Before I go into why I had such vastly divergent reactions to those two books, though, it is appropriate to mention that both fit the criteria for good literature laid out by Roth’s hero Franz Kafka, who he quoted in his novel « The Ghost Writer » as saying, « We should only read those books that bite and sting us. »
Say what you will about Roth, but even at his most off-putting, his books always left an impression. Considering how the shelves of Barnes & Noble are stocked to the brim with forgettable trifles, that is no mean achievement.
Yet when I was instructed to read « Portnoy’s Complaint » as a freshman at Bard College, where it was assigned to me by the brilliant Professor Elizabeth Frank, I absolutely hated it. This was during the 2003-2004 academic period, a few years after Roth had taught a course at the college, been harshly criticized by feminist students for the poorly drawn female characters in his books and eventually lectured them about how their unflattering appraisals of his oeuvre made them analogous to Stalinist censors. I was aware that this exchange had happened before reading his book but did my best not to let it influence my judgment.
The problem was that (a) those feminists were absolutely right and (b) the book itself, though exceptionally well-written, contains, in my estimation, a repulsive central character who seems to have been crafted for the purpose of being transgressive. To my 18-year-old brain, this made the novel impossible to like.
Praise must be given to how Roth used a monologue between a patient and his psychoanalyst as the framing device for telling the story of an angry, whiny, lustful Jewish American man who uses his aggressive, self-indulgent sexuality as a tool for coping with the struggles of assimilating into modern American life. The book was widely banned (and, in the eyes of this civil libertarian, inexcusably so), with conservatives decrying it as pornographic and some Jewish critics denouncing Roth’s choice to depict his titular Jewish character in such a heinous light. The concern was that it would be seized upon by anti-Semites to reinforce their worst assumptions about Jews.
At the time I first read the book, I was also put off by its frank descriptions of sexual behavior and its loathsome and entitled jerk of a protagonist, who made me uncomfortable. Looking back, though, I see myself as being in error in these views. Roth himself articulated the best defense of the book’s depiction of amorality when celebrating its 45 year anniversary in The New York Times:
It is certainly not inaccurate to say that Jews have been involved in horrible sexual scandals, with a troubling number of powerful Jewish men being implicated by the #MeToo movement alone. To acknowledge this is not to condone anti-Semitism or to imply that this problem is in any way related to the fact that the perpetrators happen to be Jewish (which it isn’t), but rather to point out that Jews are capable of the same depravity as the gentiles who have persecuted them for millennia. It was this depravity that Roth was profiling for, depending on the place in the book, humorous or ostensibly profound effect.
That said, there is one point about the book which bothered me at the time and still does today: Namely, that the female characters exist as little more than objects, there to move the male characters forward or backward on their own narrative journeys. To point out that this was problematic, perhaps even sexist, is not the same as saying that the book should have been censored, or even that Roth himself hated women. It is, however, important for consumers of literature to draw attention to toxic tropes, even when it makes the authors themselves uncomfortable.
The other Roth book that I read came to my attention a year or so later, as I was completing my degree. While I had disliked the first Roth book that I had encountered, it had left enough of an impression that I was intrigued when I heard that the then-upcoming « The Plot Against America » was going to dive into one of my favorite subjects — American presidential history (I was, at that time, unaware that Roth had skewered President Richard Nixon in a book called « Our Gang »). At the time that I read it, I thought it was a fascinating look at what might have happened had the 1940 Republican National Convention spontaneously decided to nominate Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh as their presidential candidate, as told from the pseudo-historical perspective of a fictionalized version of Roth himself. Given that the GOP did indeed nominate a political novice on a lark at their convention that year — albeit the progressive, charismatic and kindly Wendell Willkie rather than the hateful and misanthropic Lindbergh — that aspect of it didn’t strike me as particularly far-fetched.
At the time, though, I thought it was absurd to believe that Americans would go whole hog for a presidential candidate, and then president, who openly preached hatred against a specific racial group. Never, I thought, would modern America deteriorate to such a point that it would actually reward that type of open hate-mongering. Covert hate-mongering, sure, but someone who trafficked in baseless conspiracy theories and blatantly attempted to ostracize fellow Americans because of their background? Hadn’t America resoundingly rejected Strom Thurmond in 1948, George Wallace in 1968 and (to my Jewish relief) Pat Buchanan in 2000?
You can probably see where I’m going with this.
Yet « The Plot Against America » isn’t a masterpiece solely because its counterfactual take on the 1940 presidential election had eerie parallels to the real-life 2016 presidential elections, simply swapping Lindbergh’s hatred of Jews for Trump’s hatred of Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans and women. It also works because it explains why so many Jews (presumably including Roth) are terrified of being victimized by anti-Semitism.
This is a book where a Jewish character we get to know winds up being indoctrinated into self-hatred. Another Jewish character is beaten, robbed and set on fire by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Jews are taken from their families in order to be « Americanized, » victimized by rioting, subjected to being the scapegoats in a number of increasingly outlandish (but no less hateful for it) conspiracy theories, bullied and assaulted in their everyday lives.
