CHAPTER
Forty
STOMPING ALONG THE HOUSATONIC, ROTH FOUND HIMSELF “swamped with anger” and knew he had to “write [his] way out of it” lest his head explode. “I kept thinking, ‘What is this like? What is happening to me is not innately interesting to anybody else. But what would be of interest? . . . That postwar Communist scare with the accusation: Communist, Communist. And now it’s misogynist, misogynist. You can’t elude it. If you’re stamped with it, you’re stamped with it.’ ” Roth had no desire to write about an innocent, and so conceived his hero, Ira Ringold, as a furtive Communist “full of flaws,” just as Roth himself was guilty of conducting a florid sex life behind Bloom’s back; but Eve Frame isn’t content with the mere truth, and her book accuses Ringold of being a Soviet spy besides, whereas Bloom rendered Roth as a “Machiavellian strategist” and all-around head case. “I wanted to get the valences correct,” said Roth.
The main model for Ira’s brother, Murray, was Roth’s freshman homeroom teacher, Dr. Robert (“Doc”) Lowenstein. During a 1955 House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in Newark, Lowenstein—then serving as executive vice president of the Newark Teachers Union—invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than discuss his former membership in the Communist party. “How can you be paid by the taxpayers’ money when you are obligated by your damnable Communist oath to teach the Soviet line?” Representative Clyde Doyle berated him. Lowenstein lost his job for six years, until he was vindicated and reinstated after two appeals to the New Jersey Supreme Court; when he was first fired, though, the Newark Evening News printed angry letters from readers demanding the resignation of four Board of Education members who’d dared to defend Lowenstein. Philip Roth, a year out of Bucknell, answered with a letter of his own, pointing out that “in Russia dissenters are asked to resign, and now in Newark dissenters are being asked to resign.”
Bob Lowenstein was an eighty-nine-year-old retiree living in West Orange when Roth sent a driver to pick him up and take him out to Connecticut so Roth could canvass his views on the way Newark was portrayed, before and after the riots, in a late draft of American Pastoral. The two cemented their friendship a year later, when Roth paid several visits to West Orange to discuss Lowenstein’s experiences as an ostracized teacher in the McCarthy era. Roth also had long talks with another old mentor, Irv Cohen, Cousin Florence’s husband—“a loudmouth Jew” who was tall and lanky like Abe Lincoln, the man Ira Ringold (as “Iron Rinn”) becomes famous for portraying. When Sandy read his brother’s novel, he immediately recognized the model for Eve Frame’s doomed, angry husband: “I could hear Irv’s voice loud and clear.”
ROTH WAS ALSO CONSIDERING a nonfictional corrective to Bloom’s book—namely a biography of himself, written by his best friend at the time, Ross Miller. Indeed, the men had bonded over their mutual marital woes: Miller had witnessed firsthand such curious episodes as Bloom’s wailing sprint around the fields chez Roth, while Roth had given his friend shelter in his studio when Miller was “emboldened” by Roth’s example to leave his own wife. On April 2, 1995, Miller wrote Roth thanking him for his generosity and remarking on how he’d been inspired by Roth’s “toughness”; Roth, in turn, never forgot the way Miller had stopped him from leaping off a tall building in Chicago. “Ross became a friend,” Conarroe summed it up, “at a time when Philip needed a friend.”*
It was true Roth didn’t think much of Miller as a writer—his prose, said Roth, was “no jeweled and nuanced thing”—especially after helping to edit Miller’s two published books, American Apocalypse (1990) and Here’s the Deal (1996). The first, about the Great Chicago Fire, was respectfully reviewed in The New York Times by Thomas Hine, who found it on the loose and “repetitious” side, but “overall a very thoughtful work that is particularly valuable in these times.” Wylie had agreed (via Roth) to represent Miller’s second book, which he managed to sell to a major trade publisher, Knopf, though the book’s most exhaustive reviewer, Cheryl Kent in the Chicago Tribune, doubted it would attract any interest outside her city—this despite a promising subject, with all sorts of universal implications: Block 37, an urban renewal project that had proposed the construction of a $350 million office-retail complex along the dilapidated block between Marshall Field’s on State Street and the Richard J. Daley Center on Dearborn, only to be canceled in 1990 for lack of funding. “Miller has given us an undisciplined book that, sadly, tells us little about Block 37 or the way cities are shaped,” wrote Kent, an architecture and urban planning critic, lamenting Miller’s failure to “broaden the story by referring to other cities, other blocks, other building projects.”
“I won’t tell him,” said Roth, smiling, when Douglas Hobbie opined that their mutual friend was a “shitty writer.” The fact was, Roth was relatively isolated at the time and didn’t know where else to turn; nor did he want to wait too long to counteract the damage done by Doll’s House. “I thought: ‘Someone’s gotta correct this story, or this is gonna be the story.’ And if I had dropped dead that year, that would have been the story.” Another worry was that a less sympathetic biographer would come along and, without Roth’s blessing, rely on Bloom’s “serious and libelous distortions of reality and her numerous significant omissions as a starting point.” By anointing Miller as his only authorized biographer, Roth hoped to discourage the less pure-hearted until a more or less accurate account could be published.
Miller himself was, at first, taken aback by the idea: Didn’t their friendship present a conflict of interest? This qualm—massive in its obviousness—would not deter Roth until later; at the time he was simply a little surprised by how “uncertain and overwhelmed” his friend suddenly seemed, so unlike the glib, confident fellow Roth had come to know. At any rate, a month before Doll’s House was published,† Roth pressed on Miller a list of interviewees to whom he ought to give priority because of their old age: “With all of these people,” Roth noted, “I would arrange the introduction, and make it clear that you are the authorized biographer, and that it’s my wish that they speak to no one else, if even approached.” The list included Kleinschmidt, the Schneiders (“Claire couldn’t stand the Schneiders . . . because they were bourgeois Jews”), his cousin Florence, and a couple of other elderly cousins living in Florida, Milton Roth and Gladys Kaplan. He coached Miller, too, on the line of questioning he should (“ ‘should’ is in quotation marks,” said Roth) adopt with people who’d known him when: How was it that Roth (“with his background from Leslie Street in Newark”) became a writer of all things? “Same thing with anybody in my family,” Roth urged his friend to inquire—“ ‘How did this guy become a writer?’ ”—as though Roth himself was burning to know the answer.
Meanwhile the two friends conducted a number of taped interviews between themselves, and Roth spoke freely about the kind of book he wanted Miller to write. Maxine Groffsky was “key” to understanding his early years as a writer and a man, said Roth, assuring Miller she had “no hostility” and would readily consent to an interview. Such interviews, he stressed—inside knowledge—would likely determine how much money Miller got for the book proposal Wylie would submit to publishers. Of course the Bloom issue was paramount, and it was crucial, Roth thought, that Miller persuade her to sit for an interview before I Married a Communist was published: “Her anti-Semitism you can leave out,” Roth advised. “I’m going to get her in the other book.” Indeed, he hoped Miller’s biography would finally address the whole nonsalacious, Chekhov-and-Knipper side of things: “What really went on between this actress and this writer? He’s a serious artist and she’s a serious artist.” But whenever Roth began exploring the more high-minded possibilities, he’d remember the main thesis of Bloom’s own book, and become furious all over again. “I mean, the book of hers is cuckoo,” he said during their November 13 session. “It’s so fucking cuckoo, Ross!” Eleven days later he elaborated:
I’ve always had women lawyers. This whole mad fucking misogynistic bullshit! And Shirley [Fingerhood] was my companion through this. . . . Helene’s [Kaplan] been my lawyer for twenty years. My advisers have been women. Who brought me to The New Yorker? Veronica [Geng]. The whole thing is crazy, Ross. . . . No one has more professional contacts with women, no writer, than I do. My first agent was Candida Donadio. . . . So all those key relations: lawyer, agent, editor—my first editor in New York was Rachel MacKenzie. . . . And of course I had a lifelong friendship with Mildred Martin. Of all the teachers I had at Bucknell, the lifelong friendship I had was with a [shouting] WOMAN!”
As for the ticklish subject of his sex life: Roth suggested (another word belonging in quotes) that Miller steer clear of the whole Inga Larsen can of worms, and concentrate instead on “philosophical” aspects—indeed, he insisted Miller needed to write a discrete essay, prior to the biography, about the “meaning” of sex in Roth’s life, devoid of any concrete “instances,” which could wait until the biography per se:
It wasn’t just “Fucked this one fucked that one fucked this one” [he told Miller] . . . if you’re writing the biography of Henry Miller, or Norman Mailer, or any man who hasn’t kept his sex hidden—or D. H. Lawrence, for God’s sake. Or Colette! Why shouldn’t I be treated as seriously as Colette on this? She gave a blow job to this guy in the railway station. Who gives a fuck about that? [Roth ticked off other examples of Colette’s sexual vagaries] . . . That’s just titillation. . . . That doesn’t tell me anything. What did hand jobs mean to her? Why did she like that? It has a meaning!
The proposal that Miller finally gave Roth and Wylie, however, stinted on “meaning” if not on the sex itself—“as though he were writing my biography for serialization in Hustler magazine,” said Roth, who described the proposal’s main thrust as “The Story of My Penis.” Though Miller hadn’t managed to interview Groffsky (and never would), he’d included lurid details about her dalliance with the young Roth, as well as a colorful recounting of, say, his and Mudge’s trip to England in the summer of 1968: “He was ‘living by his dick’ again, picking up ‘Hong Kong’ prostitutes on Curzon Street, doing just what he wanted—and upon his return to New York in August was ready again to ‘take his life between his teeth’ and move on.”
Roth hardly knew where to begin. Calling Miller onto the carpet in Wylie’s office, he pointed out that his dick hadn’t written more than twenty books! And had it occurred to Miller that his proposal would be circulated among New York publishers, and would all but certainly land in the hands of Maxine Groffsky, now a prominent literary agent? “What do you think the New York Post is going to do with this document when they get their hands on it? What do you think Maxine is going to do when she sees it? What do you think I think when I see it?” Also, for the first and last time ever, Roth got angry at Wylie for even considering such a proposal.
“Oddly enough, they remained friends,” said Julia Golier, who remembered that Miller was, withal, a little bitter about things. The proposal had taken time and trouble—he’d interviewed the Schneiders and Julius Goldstein, never mind his sessions with Roth himself—and Roth’s peremptory dismissal wasn’t fair. In fact, for Miller’s sake, Roth had paused long enough to consult his trusted lawyer, Helene Kaplan, who, he later reflected, “foresaw everything.” She reminded him that American Pastoral had, by then, elevated Roth to “a new plateau of extraordinary accomplishment and acclaim,” hence a corrective biography could arguably wait, and also warned him that such a project might end up straining relations with Miller and Wylie, whose friendships, he’d often told her, were essential.
Her advice had (almost) the desired effect—that is to say, seven years would pass before Roth saw fit to give Miller another crack at it.
THE HARDCOVER JACKET of American Pastoral featured an old photograph—burning along the top edge—of happy young people gathered outside a general store sipping Cokes; one of those youngsters was Hermine Pepinger Hartley, who wondered in the Star-Ledger how Roth had gotten hold of the 1938 photo and why he was using it to sell a book “about the turmoil of another generation.” In the spring of 1996, Roth had been touring Mendham, New Jersey, with the state historian, John Cunningham—who thought the area perfect for the idyllic setting of “Old Rimrock,” where Levov buys his dream house—when Roth spotted the photo on the wall of the general store in tiny Brookside, and asked the owner whether he could borrow it: an image of American innocence. Then he sat down, as ever, with his favorite graphic designer, Milton Glaser, and the two swapped ideas until they decided to set the photograph on fire, so to speak, suggesting the bombed general store in the book. Roth—who “tried to keep a strong hand in controlling and choosing book jacket design” (even for foreign editions)—directed Glaser to wash out the word “Brookside” from the photo, and arrange the back-flap copy as follows:
ACCLAIM FOR PHILIP ROTH IN THE 1990s:
1991 • Patrimony, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
1993 • Operation Shylock, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
1995 • Sabbath’s Theater, winner of the National Book Award
A person in the Houghton publicity department wrote a letter to booksellers to run in the front matter of the bound galleys: “Roth is the scourge of banality and middle-class rectitude,” it read in part, “but American Pastoral is a virtual ode to decency and middle-class convention. (As Mr. Roth put it to me recently, in an ironic comment on his own literary reputation, ‘This is the book that gives decency a good name.’) No sex, no jokes, no withering satire—why read it?” Roth considered this vulgar if well-meaning gambit an “abomination”; not only did he veto the letter, but on December 4, 1996, he faxed Wylie a message of measured outrage, asking him to inform the publisher that he wouldn’t be signing their contract (“I WILL REIMBURSE TO THEM ALL COSTS WHICH HAVE BEEN INCURRED UNTIL NOW”). Houghton smoothed things over with an apology, and invited Roth to write his own galley letter that would appear over the editorial director’s name: After a concise plot summary, Roth’s letter assured the reader that the present novel represented “the high point of an already illustrious career. I urge you to sit down as soon as you can to read the masterpiece of an American master.” The last six words became the main slogan of the ad campaign, and Roth made sure a slew of public figures received copies, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Roth was, in short, understandably proud of his book, which could hardly have come at a better time. “I was able to take the period in America that had the greatest impact on me,” he explained to David Plante’s writing class at Columbia, “and produce a narrative that encompassed everything I knew about it.” He also expected the novel would silence those critics—Updike foremost among them—who’d become exasperated with reflexive fiction about the life of a Roth-like author. “You’ve never written a better novel,” Aaron Asher wrote him, after remarking on the oddness of having to pay money for a Roth book (they were still estranged). “Come to think of it, who in our time has? About America it goes deeper than all the Rabbits put together.”
Even Michiko Kakutani seemed to agree, congratulating Roth in the Times for doing away at last with “narcissistic pyrotechnics” and daring to tackle “the very subjects he once spurned as unmanageable” (an allusion to “Writing American Fiction,” Roth’s 1960 essay about how hard it is to “make credible much of American reality”—generally misread as an injunction against even trying). “The resulting book is one of Mr. Roth’s most powerful novels ever, a big, rough-hewn work built on a grand design, a book that is as moving, generous and ambitious as his last novel, Sabbath’s Theater, was sour, solipsistic and narrow.”
Actually the stern Kakutani qualified her praise: Roth “nearly” (italics added) did away with his usual solipsism, given that his old alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, was once again the narrator—though Roth himself had decided he’d “exhausted all the possibilities” of Zuckerman with The Counterlife, even while that same novel had suggested yet another possibility: Zuckerman as “mediating intelligence” rather than a major actor in the story. To emphasize this function, in American Pastoral, Roth reduced his surrogate to little more than a “recording device” by rendering him impotent as a result of prostate surgery. (Sandy had suffered the same fate a few years before.) For this and other reasons, Zuckerman has largely withdrawn from the world when the legendary Swede, an old Weequahic acquaintance, invites him to lunch, putatively to ask for advice about a tribute to his late father he’s trying to write. But instead Levov rambles on about how well his three sons have turned out—with such persistent tedium, indeed, Zuckerman begins to question his sanity—and only later does Zuckerman learn that Levov’s daughter from a previous marriage, Merry, was the “Rimrock Bomber,” and therefore surmises that this was the real subject Swede had wanted help writing about, but lost his nerve.
Zuckerman’s frame narrative takes about eighty pages—until Zuckerman begins “to contemplate the very thing that must have baffled the Swede till the moment he died: how had he become history’s plaything?” Dancing at his high school reunion to the “honeysweet strains of ‘Dream,’ ” by Johnny Mercer, Zuckerman begins to imagine Swede’s tragedy and abruptly vanishes from the narrative—the action dissolving to a seaside vacation in Deal, New Jersey, where Swede will impulsively kiss the eleven-year-old Merry (the first scene of Roth’s 1974 ur-version)—an oblique homage to the mysterious first-person-plural narrator of Madame Bovary, who vanishes from the book after its opening pages, never to return (“the finesse is beautiful, I think”). Zuckerman lingers, however, as the “mediating intelligence”—that is, he lends his consciousness to Levov in rather the same way Joyce and Updike endow the prosaic brains of Leopold Bloom and Rabbit Angstrom with, occasionally, the nicety of genius. Levov, for his part, lacks “a drop of wit or irony to interfere with his golden gift for responsibility,” and so assumes that people who wish to seem good, loyal, and intelligent are in fact good, loyal, and intelligent. However, we are reminded that this is Zuckerman’s imagining of Swede’s story—versus whatever dull thing Swede himself would make of it—when an aperçu like this is planted in his head: “Marcia [Umanoff] was all talk—always had been: senseless, ostentatious talk, words with the whole purpose of scandalously exhibiting themselves, uncompromising, quarrelsome words expressing little more than Marcia’s intellectual vanity and her odd belief that all her posturing added up to an independent mind.”
Just as Roth, regarding his two marriages, sometimes liked to think he’d more or less accidentally stumbled into disastrous attachments with unstable women (“a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his character”), so Roth couldn’t abide the idea that Levov and his other tragic heroes are being “punished” for their human flaws; rather they’re random victims of history, and hence Roth’s notion to title his American Trilogy “Blindsided.” In American Pastoral, the whole Job-like arc (including the ambiguous restitution implied by the three good sons Swede will sire with a second wife) is presaged by Zuckerman’s memory of his favorite childhood book, The Kid from Tomkinsville, by John R. Tunis:
Tunis concludes like this: “Dusk descended upon a mass of players, on a huge crowd pouring onto the field, on a couple of men carrying an inert form through the mob on a stretcher.‡ . . . There was a clap of thunder. Rain descended upon the Polo Grounds.” Descended, descended, a clap of thunder, and thus ends the boys’ Book of Job.
I was ten and I had never read anything like it. The cruelty of life. The injustice of it. I could not believe it.
Such inscrutable cruelty and injustice will lead Zuckerman to think of his book about the Swede as The Kid from Keer Avenue. And the more Swede tries to make sense of senseless tragedy (“Daddy, kiss me the way you k-k-kiss umumumother”), the more remorseful he feels.
One of the very few critics Roth respected, Louis Menand, suggested in The New Yorker that what Swede is “blindsided by is the culture of liberal permissiveness,” and for this reason Menand predicted some readers would construe the novel as “a kind of recantation” by the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, “a swerve to the cultural right.” Lo and behold, Roth’s old nemesis Norman Podhoretz applauded “a born-again Philip Roth. . . . Here, for once, it was the ordinary Jews of his childhood who were celebrated—for their decency, their sense of responsibility, their seriousness about their work, their patriotism—and here, for once, those who rejected and despised such virtues were shown to be either pathologically nihilistic or smug, self-righteous, and unimaginative.” But Roth himself wasn’t having any of it—or rather he was having it various ways, reflecting his own thoughtful ambivalence about things. Levov is nothing if not a decent, tolerant man, but he’s hardly the embodiment of a “permissive” culture; his behavior toward Merry is sweet but unyielding: throughout his sixty-seven (numbered as such) conversations about letting her go to New York alone, he sternly imposes conditions, such as staying with their friends the Umanoffs; when she disobeys, he places her “under house arrest,” while helpfully suggesting she “[b]ring the war home” by organizing the movement in Old Rimrock. Whereupon she blows up the general store.
After reviewing catalogue blurbs for I Married a Communist, Roth had a qualm: “I would like you to excise one of the quotations, the one from the Chronicle about how much I love America. I have mixed feelings.” On the one hand, of course, Roth deeply loved America, and he articulated some of his reasons via Swede’s outrage over his daughter’s rebellion:
Stuttering, sputtering little bitch! Who the fuck did she think she was? . . .
How could she “hate” this country when she had no conception of this country? How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the “rotten system” that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her “capitalist” parents. . . . There wasn’t much difference, and she knew it, between hating America and hating them.
On the other hand, Roth himself had despised the war in Vietnam; he also despised the sort of sanctimonious bigotry—on the right or the left—that flourishes in America at the expense of enlightened tolerance. Some such idea was behind his decision (at Judith Thurman’s urging) to give the Levovs an exciting sex life—that is, to refute the convention that such people tend to be uptight, repressed; as Roth put it, “I wanted to free them from the Flaubertian anti-bourgeois fantasy that these college-educated assholes have.” The assholes in this case were the assholes on the left; hitherto Roth had said plenty about the assholes on the right, when in fact he had vitriol enough for both sides. “You’re nothing but a shitty little capitalist who exploits the brown and yellow people of the world and lives in luxury behind the nigger-proof security gates of his mansion,” Rita Cohen taunts Levov, who produces (yet again) an insight of Rothian percipience: “The unreality of being in the hands of this child! . . . What was the whole sick enterprise other than angry, infantile egoism thinly disguised as identification with the oppressed?” One imagines Podhoretz bolting up from his seat to applaud, though Roth would not relish his good opinion; besides, as any reader of Patrimony already knew, Roth had plenty of love for decent, hardworking people who lead “ordinary” lives. Indeed, the final two sentences of American Pastoral—though naturally meant “to cut both ways,” as Roth wrote Solotaroff—serve rather as a refutation of Tolstoy: “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” To which Roth replied (only a little tongue-in-cheek), “What’s so ‘terrible’ about this guy? He’s a successful civil servant! He enjoys his draperies and his furniture and daughter, whatever. . . . Tolstoy’s nuts. What does he expect people to be?” Thus, too, the Levovs: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”
Roth’s exquisitely nuanced rendering of “massive historical pain” in the person of Swede Levov, along with the tragic heroes to follow in his American Trilogy, would propel him into a category of his own as a novelist. “Roth is Niagara,” his admiring peer Cynthia Ozick wrote of American Pastoral. “They should stop fiddling in Stockholm already and make the telephone call.”
IT WAS BOB LOWENSTEIN who first informed Roth that “Swede” Masin’s real name was the same as Levov’s: Seymour. That was news to Roth, who’d chosen the name because it alliterated with Swede; he’d had no desire to further risk a libel suit by borrowing Masin’s nickname and first name. Not only that, said Lowenstein, but a decade ago he’d bumped into Masin at a reunion, and the man looked a lot like Mayor Lindsay—the same way Levov is described in the novel.
Six weeks after American Pastoral was published, The New Yorker ran a “Talk of the Town” piece about Masin, a seventy-eight-year-old former liquor salesman who, it turned out, had already discovered he’d been “Rothed” (as the magazine’s Tad Friend put it). “Here was this big writer writing about me,” said Masin. “But I’d never met him, never spoken to him, and only read one of his books, Portnoy’s Complaint—it didn’t thrill me. Some people said to me, ‘You should sue!’ Please. Roth portrayed me as a decent, good guy, which I think is unusual for him to do.” Indeed, Masin was repeatedly struck by his resemblance to the other Swede (“almost everything in the book I would have done if I’d been in those situations”), though he found the sex scenes in poor taste: “it was me having this sex. Just not necessary.”
Roth was disgusted by the New Yorker piece (“the tabloid-mentality is now standard and everywhere,” he wrote Lowenstein), though he was delighted, a year later, to receive a note from Masin, who addressed him as “Phil” (“Pardon my Famillarity [sic] . . . I feel a sort of closeness to you through the ‘Book’ ”) and asked him to autograph his copy of the novel. Better still was meeting the Swede in person, on May 3, 1999, when Masin attended a Roth tribute at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark; after the program, Masin and his daughter introduced themselves to Roth in the lobby. The daughter quipped that she had nothing in common with Merry, the Rimrock Bomber, though her father pointed out yet another strange parallel between himself and the other Swede: the first Mrs. Masin, like Dawn Levov, had been a gentile beauty queen who’d competed in a Miss Essex County pageant. Whereupon Roth left the Weequahic sports legend to ponder one of his favorite Flaubertian maxims: “ ‘Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.’ ”§
Roth’s three previous books (as he’d been careful to note on his jacket copy) had each received different major awards, but the Pulitzer continued to elude him. The favorite to win in 1998, most agreed, was DeLillo’s Underworld, a novel every bit as ambitious as Roth’s in its socio-historical scope. “Baked ziti,” DeLillo wrote Roth. “There is baked ziti in my book too. . . . Riots. You think I don’t have riots? Bombs. I have bombs. . . . Decayed old neighborhoods. You have Newark, I have the Bronx.” What DeLillo didn’t have was a close friend—Joel Conarroe—on the Pulitzer jury, though in fairness the other two fiction judges, Gail Caldwell and Darcy O’Brien, also favored Roth’s novel: Caldwell had described it as “infuriatingly gorgeous” in her Boston Globe review, whereas O’Brien (who would die six weeks before the prize was announced) wrote his fellow judges that “everything else, no, everything, shrinks beside” American Pastoral. At any rate, the judges were no longer allowed to indicate a preference among the three finalists they recommended to the board—Roth, DeLillo, and Robert Stone for Bear and His Daughter—and Roth had hardly forgotten what happened in 1980, when the board overruled The Ghost Writer even though it was explicitly named as the jury’s favorite.
“You told me that would never happen because of politics,” said Jack Wheatcroft, his old Bucknell friend, when Roth was announced as the winner on April 14, 1998. That afternoon Roth had been “cruising the aisles of Litchfield’s Stop & Shop” and came home to find some twenty-five messages on his machine.¶ Jeffrey Posternak called from Wylie’s office to offer their prompt congratulations and let Roth know that CNN, CBS, and the Associated Press were “all eager for interviews.” “I’m a reporter for the Mountain Lakes Pulpit,” said Conarroe, “which is a weekly paper, and we’d like to do an interview with you at your convenience about growing up in New Jersey and in Quahog—Queequeg?—whatever that is.” Michael Herr: “What a thrill it must be to share the dais with Michiko Kakutani” (who’d won for criticism). “Everyone thought Anita Brookner was gonna get it.” Other well-wishers included DeLillo (“Put some brandy in your Jell-O tonight”), Bellow (“I thought I would lay my bouquet”), Styron (“Richly deserved, as I said about fifteen years ago when you got euchred out of it”), Lowenstein (“Mazel tov!”), and an emotional Sylvia Tumin (“Big hugs, big kisses . . . love you”), whose husband, Mel, had died four years before and been movingly eulogized by Roth. But none was as emotional as Sandy, who burst into tears the moment his brother called him back.