Mariner Is Bringing Philip Roth Back — Which Raises the Usual Questions
Philip Roth has been dead since 2018 and is still generating more column inches than most living writers. This week's instalment: Mariner Books has announced a reissue programme for his backlist, which will presumably bring a new generation of readers to American Pastoral, The Human Stain, Portnoy's Complaint, and the rest of the substantial shelf he left behind.
The announcement will prompt, in approximately equal measure, the following responses: excitement from readers who feel Roth's work is overdue for reassessment; irritation from critics who think it's already been assessed quite enough; and a certain amount of performative exasperation from people who find the whole Roth conversation exhausting, which is itself a kind of engagement.
The books are, of course, the thing. And the books — whatever one thinks of the man, whatever one thinks of the biographical readings that shadowed the later work — are considerable. American Pastoral is as good a novel about the American century as the twentieth century produced. The Zuckerman novels trace an argument about Jewish-American identity that hasn't been matched. The Plot Against America, in the current political climate, requires no special pleading.
The question a reissue programme always raises is not whether the work deserves it — it does — but what context it gets. Updike's reissues have come with little critical apparatus reconsidering his treatment of women. Roth's presumably will be somewhat more loaded. The books are strong enough to survive that loading. Whether the conversation they generate this time will be more interesting than the last one is less certain.
