CHAPTER
Forty-Seven
WHEN DICK STERN WAS ASKED BY THE NOBEL PRIZE Committee, in 1983, to suggest candidates for its literature prize, he pointed out that the two he’d suggested when previously asked, almost twenty years before, had both gone on to win: Saul Bellow and Samuel Beckett. Now he urged the committee to consider four Englishlanguage writers “who may have been disregarded because of certain sorts of popularity”: Philip Larkin, Harold Pinter, J. F. Powers, and Philip Roth—the last “a true craftsman with a streak of authentic comic genius.” Given the Swedish Academy’s aversion to comic genius, not to say “certain sorts of popularity,” only one of Stern’s candidates would ultimately be honored this time. Ten years later, in 1993, Harold Bloom named Roth in The Washington Post as the most deserving living candidate for the Nobel, and in the book Bloom published the following year, The Western Canon, he listed six Roth novels (the most of any living writer) as worthy of permanent interest—this, mind, before the publication of Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral, which became Bloom’s preeminent Roth novels thereafter.
Roth was the perennial American favorite for the prize during the twenty-three-year dry spell that followed the 1993 selection of Toni Morrison, and his chances seemed vastly improved after the magisterial, high-minded American Trilogy. Certainly his friends rallied to the cause. In 2003, Joel Conarroe, the president of PEN America, enumerated the major prizes Roth had won for just the five novels he’d written since the age of sixty; quite aware that Roth was mostly known in Sweden as the author of Portnoy, and never mind the even more lurid Sabbath, Conarroe also reminded the academy that Roth was altruistic, what with his editorship of the Writers from the Other Europe series—“but it is clearly for his own extraordinary fiction,” he concluded, “and not for good international citizenship, as it were, that he is worthy of the one major award he has not yet been given. There is no living writer more deserving of a Nobel Prize for Literature.” Five years later, writing on behalf of the British Academy, Hermione Lee tried a kind of decorous shaming: “It is a matter of amazement to many cultural commentators, readers, scholars and critics, not only within the United States but worldwide, that he has not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.” Naturally she also mentioned Writers from the Other Europe, to no avail.
That was the year (2008) the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, let it be known the fix was in for European, or anyway non-American, writers. The United States is “too isolated, too insular,” he said, noting that only 3 percent of books published in the States each year were works in translation, versus 27 percent in France and 28 percent in Spain. “Europe,” he said, “still is the center of the literary world.” Roth was reminded of Engdahl’s remarks the following year, when, as the first-ever recipient of the PEN/Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, he sat on the 2009 jury considering “a superabundant pool of superior American talent” before deciding to give the award to Cormac McCarthy. “[W]e would contend,” Roth said at the time, “that American novelists must surely be among the best in the world.” Privately Roth was always dismissive on the subject of the Nobel, which he liked to call a “narcissistic extravaganza.” So would he pull a Sartre and turn it down? “No, I wouldn’t do anything out of the ordinary,” he said on October 13, 2012, two days after the prize had gone to Mo Yan of China. “I would accept it. But it’s not gonna happen.”
ON APRIL 11, 2008, in honor of Roth’s seventy-fifth birthday, a tribute was held at Columbia’s inauspiciously named Miller Theatre. While Roth sat in the front row, six feet away, two panels of writers and critics discussed his work. The first, moderated by Judith Thurman, was a relatively young group of writers including Charles D’Ambrosio, Nathan Englander, and Jonathan Lethem, who all mentioned their formative discovery of Roth’s work on their parents’ bookshelves. As a boy, Englander’s identification with Roth was reinforced by the way his mother used to call him to table: “Dinner’s ready, Portnoy!”
The second panel, moderated by Conarroe, comprised an older generation, each of whom was asked to discuss a favorite Roth novel for about five minutes. After Claudia Roth Pierpont and Ben Taylor gave loving appreciations of Sabbath and Shylock, respectively, Hermione Lee spoke with daunting poise about The Ghost Writer; meanwhile Ross Miller either peered at his notes or gazed wanly into the darkness. He was next.
“It seems like we planned this, Hermione,” he began, noting that he intended to discuss The Counterlife, which, after all, “completes this first five-book exploration of the life of Nathan Zuckerman, the subject which is the, probably, an unprecedented series of books on the vocation of a writer. . . .
So The Counterlife plays with, engages certain conceits or ideas that this career as a writer has generated in Zuckerman, that is, not only do writers, novelists, impersonate other people . . . but we’re impersonating other people, that is, civilians, everyone here. We do various impersonations, and the exploration of this is titanically treated in The Counterlife with a series of, of, of episodes that have a certain logical connection but there’s really no necessity for it.
On it went. “I was shocked by his performance,” Roth said of Miller, who sidled up to him afterward and murmured, “I wasn’t much impressed by the other three.”
“Well, now he’s surrounded with sycophants,” said Miller, three months later, during what would prove his final interview (with Brustein) as a biographer. “The irony is that they’re either homosexual men—of course he’s homophobic—or these silly women. They’re serious women, but they’re silly in their presentation of self. They’re low impact: he likes that.” Two years later, Roth himself would listen to these interviews, one after another, all nine of them,* pausing to make notes along the way. “I don’t even think Gitta Sereny’s moral assessment of Albert Speer is as bleak as Ross’s of me,” he observed at one point.
Roth especially regretted exposing his only surviving family members to Miller’s “mean, insatiably vilifying spirit”—his cousin Florence, for instance, who would die of cancer soon after Miller finally interviewed her on March 4, 2007. At one point she regaled him with a memory of how she used to phone Philip from Sandy’s New York apartment, alerting him that his parents had just left and would soon be home, where Philip was entertaining Maxine or some other young woman. “This is really a trip down mammary lane,” Miller quipped for the eighty-five-year-old woman, followed by an outburst that must have startled her: “There is a predatory side to both Sandy and Philip. They look at women—I’m not gonna write about this—but they are misogynist. They talk about women in that way.”
Miller also tried to entice Roth’s sickly, adoring brother into confirming certain grim assumptions. “I always refer to it as the broken wing syndrome,” Sandy mildly replied, after Miller noted how a number of Philip’s girlfriends had had fathers who killed themselves. “I have a broken wing and I go for broken wings.” “But you don’t break wings,” said Miller, and Sandy, after a shocked pause, replied, “Doesn’t even enter my thinking.” Miller riffed on the theme more explicitly with Stern, citing Roth’s scheme to get Brigit pregnant so he could “capture her,” the better to have a young woman taking care of him in his dotage—a young woman, moreover, who’d previously cared for a dying mother and therefore had the “Janis [Bellow] credential.”
Stern mulled this disturbing conversation for more than two weeks before phoning Roth on December 31, 2006: Ross, he said, had interrupted him repeatedly, ranting away for some “85 percent” of the interview; ominous, too, Stern thought, was Ross’s remark that he wouldn’t publish his book until Roth was dead. “I conclude from this that Ross is in a hostilely rivalrous relationship with me,” Roth noted after hanging up, “because of his work for Volume Three of the LOA series being criticized and rejected by me.” In the months ahead, Roth continued to get reports that his biographer had gone rogue—“This man is not your friend,” his cousin Florence informed him—until, after the Columbia tribute, Thurman got an earful from Miller. According to an alarmed memo Roth prepared on May 29, 2008, for his executors, Golier and Wylie, Miller had boasted to Thurman that he’d actually “coauthored” Roth’s novels, beginning with The Counterlife, as opposed to reading them in rough draft and helpfully discussing them afterward. Also he’d confidently diagnosed Roth as manic-depressive; Thurman had argued with Miller that she’d certainly seen Roth depressed, but hardly manic—if the happy relief that follows recovery from a major depression is mania, well, then most of her friends were manic-depressive. Hearing of this, Roth was reminded of the Little, Brown lawyer’s mention of a “reliable source” for the reference to his alleged “bipolar disorder” in galleys for Leaving a Doll’s House.†
On November 14, 2009, Barbara Sproul wrote Roth a puzzled note: “Months ago some fellow from the University of Connecticut saying he was your biographer contacted me and then didn’t follow up (sent me an email and then blocked the response, called to make a date and when I couldn’t make that one didn’t call again); I don’t know if you still want him to talk to me or not.” Whether this was vacillation or fecklessness on Miller’s part is hard to say; around this time, anyway, he and his subject mutually decided to end things, and, in keeping with their (confidential) agreement, Miller returned four boxes of research to Roth.
Roth transferred Miller’s interviews to CD format, then proceeded to listen carefully to every interview, hitting pause every five minutes or so and typing his exhaustive response to “the errors and lies recorded in those five minutes before proceeding to listen to the next five minutes.” When he was done, months later, he had amassed hundreds of pages of commentary he decided to title “Notes on a Slander-Monger”: “You are, of course, free to quote or paraphrase (or challenge) as you like,” he wrote Miller’s successor on March 28, 2013. “I think it’s bigger than Moby Dick though written more in the spirit of The Confidence Man.”
ROTH WAS A GREAT ADMIRER of Sherwood Anderson, and always figured if Winesburg, Ohio, had had a college, it would have been the same kind of place (“just steeped in Christian values”) as Bucknell in the fifties. Remembering, not altogether accurately perhaps, how appalled he’d been by Ann Sides’s sudden fellatio in the cemetery‡—such a young woman must be a child of divorce, he’d suspected at the time—Roth conceived a novel, Indignation, in which a bright young man attends Winesburg College during the Korean War, becomes smitten with an emancipated, troubled young woman, and dooms himself with a series of slight rebellions.
The trick, said Roth, was working out Marcus Messner’s fate—death in the war—so that it seemed inevitable. “A tragedy in the original sense of the word,” he wrote in his notes. “The Greek sense. . . . He runs away and that’s how he gets caught.” Like the young Roth, Marcus is eager to escape his crazily paranoid (i.e., weirdly prescient) father, a kosher butcher, who begins “hounding [him] day and night about [his] whereabouts”: “You are a boy with a magnificent future before you—how do I know you’re not going to places where you can get yourself killed?” Marcus finds sanctuary at Winesburg, where he hopes to become valedictorian while studying law—a profession “as far as you could get from spending your working life in a stinking apron covered with blood,” the pursuit of which leads him to the bloodbath in Korea. His “angel of death” is a handsome Jewish boy, Sonny Cottler, who arranges for one of his fraternity brothers to attend chapel in Marcus’s place—a chain of events the narrator evokes with a string of wistful “If only”s: “If only Cottler hadn’t befriended him! If only he hadn’t let Cottler hire Ziegler to proxy for him at chapel!”—and so on, every step inevitable given the hero’s peculiar brand of hubris, a determined atheism: “If only he’d gone to chapel himself! . . . But he couldn’t! Couldn’t believe like a child in some stupid god! Couldn’t listen to their ass-kissing hymns! . . . The disgrace of religion, the immaturity and ignorance and shame of it all!” Nor does Marcus see any choice in his most fatal transgression: saying “Fuck you” (twice) to Dean Caudwell, who had demanded he write a letter of apology to the college president.
Roth’s detractors were hard on Indignation, which Malcolm Jones denounced as “terrible” in Newsweek—“the work of the late-late Roth, the Roth of bitter, bitten-off miniatures like Everyman and Exit Ghost: curt, tetchy, unhumorous.” That last adjective is surprising, since the tone of the novel is nothing if not droll. Seeing Olivia Hutton for the first time in the library, Marcus, loath to commit even the slightest error, forbears to masturbate: “The strong desire to rush off to the bathroom was quelled by my fear that if I did so, I might get caught by a librarian or a teacher or even by an honorable student, be expelled from school, and wind up a rifleman in Korea” (as he will in any case, partly because he allows Olivia to do the masturbatory honors while he lies abed in the hospital). The book’s centerpiece—a long dispute between the dean and Marcus, who marshals the anti-Christian arguments of Bertrand Russell—was justly described by Frank Kermode as “impassioned, educated, silly, and very funny,” while David Gates applauded the “ruthlessly economical and relentlessly deathbound” craft of the book. As in Waugh’s early farces, Roth dispenses with exposition wherever possible to suggest things happening abruptly to Marcus, without (quite) his volition. One paragraph relates his happy, semi-independent freshman year at Robert Treat, in Newark, whereupon the next paragraph lands him bang in Winesburg, where in short order he’ll fatefully take out Olivia, whose name we’re told before we quite grasp that she’s the same girl in the library a page earlier.
Praising the novel in the London Review of Books, Kermode remarked on the overall hostile trend toward Roth’s later work: “He ought to be past caring, but it isn’t always easy, given the man’s temperament, to overlook the meanness of spirit that characterizes the attacks, determined as they are to ‘get’ him.” This time they succeeded: Roth loved the first and last of his four “Nemeses” novellas, but he would always believe “something went haywire” with Indignation—not as haywire, to be sure, as his next novel, but haywire nonetheless.
AFTER ROTH’S FALLING-OUT with Aaron Asher in 1994—when Asher had admonished Roth not to be so “selfish” and let Bloom “at least” have his studio on West Seventy-ninth—Roth claimed it was he who made amends within “six months” or “about a year.” Actually it was more like six years. Asher’s friendly note about the strangeness of having to pay money for American Pastoral was followed three years later with a similar note about The Human Stain (“it definitively puts you right up there among the immortals”), ending thus: “This book makes me realize how much I miss our friendship”; Roth scribbled “Call Aaron” on the back of the envelope. Later that year Asher was found to have bladder cancer, and Roth promptly offered to help defray his medical expenses; then, four years later, Asher was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “This is the greatest living writer in America,” he kept telling his twelve-year-old granddaughter, Susanna, who’d walked him over to Roth’s apartment one day to hear the author read from Everyman.
Asher succumbed to cancer on March 16, 2008, before Alzheimer’s could entirely wipe out his mind. Almost three years later, Roth would complain to the Kunderas that his friends were dying in droves (“and most are irreplaceable, like Aaron”). When Roth had visited three or four days before Asher’s death, they reminisced awhile about their fifty-year friendship, then Roth embraced him and said goodbye; Asher began to cry and said, “I love you,” and Roth said he loved him too.§
Ted Solotaroff died five months later of emphysema. He’d come a long way from the tetchy, down-at-heels grad student who’d inspired the hapless Paul Herz of Letting Go; along with his successful career as an editor-critic, Solotaroff had finally married an heiress, Virginia Heiserman, his fourth wife (number two had been Shirley Fingerhood, Roth’s divorce lawyer), with whom he shared a spacious apartment near Columbia, a house in the Hamptons, and even a pied-à-terre in Paris. Over the years he’d been one of Roth’s most stalwart readers, one of a handful recruited to hold forth at “The Roth Explosion” in Aix, and also handpicked by Roth to edit, brilliantly, Alfred Kazin’s America. “His distinctive voice will always be—in his own apt phrase—one of the few good voices in my head,” Roth wrote in a subsequent tribute.
Roth and Updike had been estranged for almost a decade when Roth was “shocked and saddened” to learn of his great rival’s death, from lung cancer, on January 27, 2009. Eight months later, the absence was still “incomprehensible” to Roth: “He was the indestructible writer with the indestructible fluency,” he wrote Ted Hoagland. “He was an ace, maybe the ace. ‘The’ suits him fine, in nearly every regard.” Indeed, what Roth had always envied most about Updike was his “fucking fluency”—the “gush of prose” that flowed through the man’s fingers at the rate of three pages a day, every day, for more than half a century, resulting in forty-five books of stories, poetry, and essays, and twenty-eight novels: seventy-three books!¶ Roth’s own thirty-one came at a relative trickle of a page a day, usually, and he was “delighted to accept” that much. Given their kindred obsessions—and very different temperaments withal—it was probably for the best they contented themselves with an amiable, occasional correspondence, meeting in person (Roth figured) maybe half a dozen times. One evening, in 1991, Roth and Bloom had gone to dinner at John and Martha Updike’s mansion on the Atlantic in Beverly, Massachusetts, where John was pleased to conduct his colleague on a tour of his working annex—the four little offices where he wrote fiction, criticism, poetry, and miscellanea, respectively. That night at dinner the couples got to talking about a scene in Updike’s memoir, Self-Consciousness, where he masturbates one of Mary Updike’s friends in the backseat of a car while his first wife drives them home from the ski basin. “Martha was very upset that John had included the scene in the book,” Roth recalled in a letter to Updike’s biographer, “John was boyishly silent while she spoke and I ventured to say that he included it in the book for the same reason that he had done it—he was indulging ‘the imp of the perverse’ ” (“Just like me,” Roth told Stern).
A testament to Roth’s essential magnanimity—especially among peers—was the initiative he took to invite Updike to lunch, in Cambridge, two years after the man’s “very mean-spirited” review of Operation Shylock. Thanking him for it afterward, Updike promised never to review another Roth novel; chagrined by his tendency to go from “high homage” to “nagging complaint,” he was determined now to be simply a “contented consumer.” And so it went. Updike professed to love the “inyour-face (literally) sex” of Sabbath’s Theater and was all the more “agog” when his colleague began to “lengthen [his] stride and intensify [his] focus” with American Pastoral.
When Leaving a Doll’s House was published, however, Updike’s imp of the perverse got the better of him. “A good woman wronged, that was my impression,” he waggishly wrote a colleague. “And to think that my friendly little review”—of Shylock—“broke it up. Well you never . . .” The word “wronged” popped up again in Updike’s long essay “On Literary Biography,” which appeared in the February 4, 1999, issue of The New York Review of Books: “Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, shows him to have been, as their marriage rapidly unraveled, neurasthenic to the point of hospitalization, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive.” Roth’s letter to the editor was swift and quasi-equable: “Allow me to imagine a slight revision of this sentence,” he wrote:
“Claire Bloom, presenting herself as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, alleges him to have been neurasthenic to the point of hospitalization, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive.” Written thus, the sentence would have had the neutral tone that Mr. Updike is careful to maintain elsewhere in this essay on literary biography when he is addressing Paul Theroux’s characterization of V. S. Naipaul and Joyce Maynard’s characterization of J. D. Salinger. Would that he had maintained that neutral tone in my case as well.
Updike’s reply followed: “Mr. Roth’s imagined revisions sound fine to me, but my own wording conveys, I think, the same sense of one-sided allegations.” That both his essay and reply were, as Roth later put it, “not only ungenerous but cruelly obtuse” seemed also to occur to Updike, who emended the key sentence as Roth had specified when the essay was reprinted as a chapbook by the University of South Carolina Press: “See page 28,” he inscribed Roth’s copy. “With apologies and best wishes, John.”# But it was too little, too late: “Who’s gonna see this fucking monograph from the USC press?” Roth said in 2012. “So I just never talked to him again.”
In a long interview for The Telegraph, three months before he died, Updike gave “a cryptic smile” when asked whether he and Roth were friends. “Guardedly,” he said, allowing that a sense of rivalry complicated matters, and concluding, “But he’s been very good to have around as far as goading me to become a better writer.” Which of course was Roth’s view as well, and he went further when asked to comment for Updike’s obituary in the Times: “John Updike is our time’s greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
Finally, Roth’s brother died on May 6, 2009. In recent years the two had grown closer still, in part because Sandy’s third wife, Dorene Marcus, was a smart, good-natured lawyer who read books—indeed, had been reading her brother-in-law’s work since her twenties, and now was delighted by the eerie similarities and differences between the two men. On the day she first met Sandy’s celebrated sibling, she woke up and heard what “sounded like one person talking” in the living room—echoing what Stern had said about his impulse to visit Sandy, while estranged from Philip, because he loved to hear his absent friend’s voice.**
Philip had been horrified by his brother’s decline. He’d immediately arranged to get a prostate exam, in 1991, around the time Sandy had had his own cancerous prostate removed, resulting in impotence and frequent incontinence. (Philip interviewed him at length about the various embarrassments, passing them along to Zuckerman.) By then he’d come to regard Sandy as almost his “biological twin,” all the more since the brothers had gotten bypass operations five years apart: their age difference. In 1997, thirteen years after Sandy’s first bypass, he and Marcus were in New Jersey, visiting his son Jonathan, when Sandy began to experience chest pains and shortness of breath; Philip phoned his own surgeon at New York Hospital, Karl Krieger, and arranged for his brother to be transported by ambulance for emergency surgery. Meanwhile, Philip readied his apartment for Sandy’s convalescence: filling the refrigerator with food, making up the bed with clean sheets, and arranging a fresh box of tissues and a water pitcher on the bedside table. Sandy, arriving, hobbled straight to bed and stretched out, smiling at the bedside table: “Just like Bessie,” he sighed happily.
In his final two years Sandy could hardly walk to the bathroom. His spine had crumbled quite as badly as his brother’s, and he lost six inches of height; meanwhile his heart failure made it hard to breathe or think. His wife’s “saddest memory” was when she’d asked the lifelong drafts-man to draw a clock, and he bunched all the numbers up on one side. Toward the end, too, he became more and more paranoid, suspecting she and the caregivers were conspiring to kill him. “Old age has been monstrous with him,” Philip wrote their cousin Joan. As with Bellow, Philip saved up jokes to tell his brother on the phone, and could occasionally get a laugh. Sandy’s own last joke came when the night nurse—“a very effusive young man,” Marcus remembered—tried to coax the invalid into drinking a little water: “Sandy,” he said, “you are the apple of my eye!” “More like applesauce,” Sandy feebly replied.
Philip delivered the eulogy at Sandy’s funeral in Skokie, and hardly a day passed afterward that he didn’t think about his kindly older brother and how much more alone in the world he was now. Of his annual visit to his parents’ graves in 2011, he wrote Jack Miles: “It was the second time I’ve been there since my brother died in 2009 and I was overwhelmed by my sense of being the last of our little family left standing and by the fact that it is a matter of time now—and perhaps not that much—before I am gone and with me the memory of our family life together.”
DEATH, THEN, was much on Roth’s mind when he began The Humbling, whose premise was based on a story Claire Bloom had told him about the actor Ralph Richardson. “The magic is gone,” said the latter, after a bad night onstage when he found he couldn’t act anymore. “He’d lost his magic,” Roth’s novel begins; as with its predecessor, the main exercise was to make the actor-hero’s fate seem inevitable—“surprising, but inevitable,” said Roth, “—just as suicides are?”
The Humbling is an enervated performance, and it’s hard not to read Simon Axler’s maundering about the loss of his gift (“You can get very good at getting by on what you get by on when you don’t have anything else”) as the author’s lament for his own dying light—as if he’s only too conscious of writing a bad novel about not being able to write anymore. Roth liked to describe creative fluency in terms of freedom—“He’s free as a bird,” he said of Updike’s work in the Rabbit novels—and so with the stymied Axler, who tells his agent, “You’re either free or you aren’t. You’re either free and it’s genuine, it’s real, it’s alive, or it’s nothing. I’m not free anymore.” As for Roth’s efforts to make acting a plausible, detailed correlative for writing—or at least an occupation somewhat understood from the inside—they seem perfunctory at best. He mentions, say, the old exercise of pretending to sip from a teacup (“There was always a sly voice inside me saying, ‘There is no teacup’ ”), but it’s a long way from Sabbath’s puppetry or the glove factory in American Pastoral. Among Dick Stern’s papers is a draft of his messy, unsent first response to Roth’s novel, in which he gropes for a tactful way to tell Roth that he, like many a much lauded contemporary, was wearily going through the motions now, and maybe the time had come to quit: “I think you are updiking (and trolloping and bellowing and xing [sic] a la almost every active old writer), writing too quickly, even frantically [crossed out], too much for yourself, and not writing the little masterpieces you can still write. . . . Maybe you can’t anymore. (I stopped because I spotted the repetitions and didn’t have the strength to invent new ways or even carry out fictional impulses as I used to. . . . ).”
Beginning with Axler himself, the characters are abstractions, and not very coherent abstractions; they make the cast of Everyman—the allegorical morality play, not the novel—seem marvels of roundness. Axler shares his creator’s terror that life will be empty without his art, alone in the sticks with nothing to distract him from loneliness: “It’s sometimes astonishing,” he says, “sitting here month after month, season after season, to think that it’s all going on without you. Just as it will when you die.” But Axler has nothing of Roth’s humor or charm, and one can’t fathom why such a gloomy codger would attract (never mind sexually) the “vibrant” lesbian Pegeen—“solid, fit, brimming with energy,” predatory and dildo wielding, yet utterly unremarkable otherwise: “She’s not at all beautiful. She’s not that intelligent.” Indeed, she’s little more than an agent of doom, about as nuanced as a safe falling out of the sky.
Michiko Kakutani reviewed the “slight, disposable work” with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, but at least she wasn’t making an invidious comparison. The future Nobel laureate’s stories were “psychologically obtuse, clumsily plotted and implausibly contrived,” whereas Roth was still flogging away at “the same preoccupations sketched out in the flimsy Everyman.” Kathryn Harrison’s “witty takedown” of Roth in the Times Book Review earned her a “highbrow/brilliant” mention on New York magazine’s “Approval Matrix.” “Wow,” she remarked of Pegeen’s whipping up a batch of spaghetti carbonara for Axler prior to jumping into bed with him (her first heterosexual coupling since college). “That must happen to a lot of depressed people.”
Roth conceded that The Humbling was easily “the weakest” of his later books, though he affected to be pleased with certain “audacious things” in it; the green dildo was surely among them: “The green cock plunged in and out of the abundant naked body,” he wrote of Pegeen’s stern treatment of Tracy, a drunk woman she and Axler pick up for a three-some. “This was not soft porn.” “Bad sex award shortlist pits Philip Roth against stiff competition,” punned The Guardian, when Roth was in the running for the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award—the only award he might have won for The Humbling, were it not for the even worse sex in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.††
Pegeen’s model, Susan Rogers, had been in touch with Roth a couple of times since their ugly breakup in early 2005—namely when her mother, Jacquie, died that August, and again when her father died in April 2007. “The trouble with fiction, as our friend Phil pointed out long ago,” Tom Rogers had written Stern six months before his death, “is that reality is more fantastic than anything we can imagine and make real to ourselves.” Whether that meant he knew about his daughter’s affair with Roth is uncertain. Once, Jacquie had predicted that Susan would run away with a young man named John, the son of her closest friend. “Worse things could happen,” said Susan, and her father remarked, “Yes, like you run off with Phil.”
The one and only time Susan ever felt grateful that her parents were dead was after reading The Humbling. “ ‘Oh goody,’ ” she remembered thinking, when a new Roth book landed on her doorstep; that night she crawled into bed around ten, expecting to read for maybe half an hour before dropping off. She finished at one in the morning, fighting an urge to vomit. It was all there: Pegeen’s parents are “good friends” of the protagonist; Pegeen’s previous lover undergoes a sex change; Pegeen wangles a job in the east by sleeping with a college dean, who, once jilted, says to Axler, “Be forewarned, Mr. Famous: she’s desirable, she’s audacious, and she’s utterly ruthless, utterly cold-hearted, incomparably selfish, and completely amoral.” “I never stalked you,” the real-life dean intoned over the phone, without referring to The Humbling per se. She didn’t have to. “Yes,” Rogers replied, “and I never made spaghetti carbonara.”
Rogers let a year or so pass before agreeing to meet Roth for dinner at the West Street Grill. “You know, your book really hurt me,” she said, and began to cry. Roth was looking “dumbstruck” when a stranger came over and introduced himself: “We met at a dinner party ten years ago,” the man said, and Roth brightened: “Oh! You’re the lawyer!” Oblivious to Roth’s weeping companion, the man kept jumping up from his chair and coming back over to talk, and Roth did nothing to discourage him. Later Roth was pleased to mention that he and Rogers were back in touch. “She asked why was everyone in the book depicted as ‘so mean.’ I told her I didn’t see it that way—and a friendship resumed.” “Of all the books that would have to deal with me and my life,” said Rogers, “it’s his worst fucking novel.” And yet she put it behind her, more or less; on the whole Roth was easier to take now that there was no question of a romantic attachment, and a friendship did in fact persist until the end.