When the word first came down that Philip Roth was at work on his “memoirs,” it sounded like some kind of bad joke. What else (an ungenerous observer might inquire) had Roth been doing for the 30 years of his literary career but producing an ongoing autobiography, picking obsessively through his own past and recycling his life experiences, slightly transformed, as literature?
The Facts begins with a letter from Roth, addressed to Zuckerman. The two men apparently maintain a friendly but somewhat formal relationship (they address one another by last names, in a near parody of American masculinity: “Dear Zuckerman. . . . Sincerely, Roth”). In forthright, slightly brusque tones, Roth describes briefly how he came to commit these memories to paper. Following some sort of mental breakdown, he felt the need to retrace his steps, to follow his unhappiness back to its source. The manuscript he’s come up with, he asserts, is a rarity for him: It represents experience untransformed by the power of imagination. “If in one way The Counterlife can be read as fiction about structure,” he claims, “then this is the bare bones, the structure of a life without the fiction.” The letter begins by asking Zuckerman whether he thinks the enclosed manuscript should be published, and concludes with a question that echoes with embarrassing poignancy throughout the rest of the book: “Is it any good?”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
What follows is the autobiography proper: not a connected or even coherent life story by any means, but a series of discrete vignettes touching on the experiences that made Roth The Writer He Is Today. They cover his childhood growing up in the heavily Jewish Weequahic section of Newark; his career as “Joe College,” the idealistic student of literature at Bucknell; the early stages of his relationship with his crazed and terrifying wife, who appears in My Life as a Man as “Maureen Johnson” and in this book as “Josie Jensen”; his run-ins with the American Jewish establishment over charges of “self-hatred” and “anti-Semitism” aroused by Goodbye, Columbus; and finally, his emergence from the scarring marriage (thanks to his wife’s death in an automobile accident), and the burst of artistic energy that culminated in Portnoy’s Complaint.
It’s not that Roth is exculpatory toward his young self, either; there are numerous occasions, particularly in discussing his literary aspirations and his activities as a student, when he is startlingly harsh and unforgiving to the youth he once was. But without the protective screen of fiction, he turns cautious. The book is littered with telltale signposts pointing toward evasions and ellipses and toward the smoothing over of this or that unpleasant aspect.
But there are a number of important aspects of Philip Roth that are conspicuously absent, beginning, astoundingly, with the subject of The Counterlife’s embarrassing curtain speech: his cock. He does admit to three or four “fantasy-ridden, entangled couplings” with Josie during a rocky period before their marriage, and speaks loftily of the “earnest physical fervor” of his subsequent romantic attachment; in one particularly bloodless sentence, he mentions choosing one college fraternity over another because “I believed I would need a slightly more profligate, less utopian atmosphere in which to realize even a tenth of the nefarious erotic prospectus that I had been secretly preparing for years.”
When the syntax isn’t distended it’s convoluted:
“Don’t publish” is only the beginning. In page upon page of vibrant and beautifully written prose (a relief after Roth’s dusty, professorial contortions), Zuckerman exposes the book’s shortcomings with pitiless accuracy. Compared to Zuckerman, Roth is a feeble, poorly shaped character, “the least completely rendered of all your protagonists.” His recollections are shaped by concealment, inhibition, indirection. The portraits of Roth’s parents are incomplete and patently implausible, and his strained relations with the Jewish community are related with an uncharacteristic disingenuousness. “You seem almost to indicate,” says Zuckerman sternly, “that sex has never really compelled you.” Most incisively, Zuckerman upbraids Roth for his treatment of “Josie” as some kind of fictional embodiment of the demonic, instead of as a real person and a very potent adversary; in a powerfully argued passage, he urges Roth to use her real name.
