“The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality,” the novelist Philip Roth wrote in an essay called “Writing American Fiction,” published in Commentary magazine in early 1961. “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” Name-dropping various 1950s scandal artists, Roth added, “Who, for example, could have invented Charles Van Doren? Roy Cohn and David Schine? Sherman Adams and Bernard Goldfine?”
In the days since his death last week at age 85, Roth has been celebrated (and here and there skewered) for his contributions to American fiction. New York Times critic Dwight Garner called Roth the last in a generation of writers who “helped define American experience in the second half of the 20th century.” “That Rothian spirit-so full of people and stories and laughter and history and sex and fury-will be a source of energy as long as there is literature,” wrote Zadie Smith. But the outpouring of appreciations largely has skipped past Roth’s political writings-an unfortunate oversight, because Roth wasn’t just a path-breaking novelist; he was also one of the most perceptive political observers of our times.
In his early Commentary essay, he wondered if his estrangement from mainstream culture would doom him to produce “a high proportion of historical novels or contemporary satire-or perhaps just nothing.” Clearly, Roth managed in the next five decades to summon the imaginative powers to write lasting original fiction. Yet he remained a student of the American presidency, too, and at many points in his long career he took up either historical fiction or contemporary satire precisely so he could tackle the absurdities of our national politics head-on. In these forays, Roth showed not only his customary wit and ferocity, but also a clutch of political convictions born of his unwavering aversion to the misplaced moralism of both the left and the right. He did more than skewer politicians and their absurdities, however; he revealed his very human characters to hold political beliefs that were complex, deeply felt and rooted in life experience, open simultaneously to admiration and to criticism-but not merely a basket of received intellectual precepts wrapped up in a larger allegory, as in so many self-proclaimed “political novels.”
Of the many stranger-than-fiction figures Roth cited in “Writing American Fiction,” none consumed him more than Richard Nixon, whom Roth credited with inspiring him to write satire in the first place. “If one was at first amused by him, one was ultimately astonished,” Roth wrote. “As a literary creation, as some novelist’s image of a certain kind of human being, he might have seemed believable, but I myself found that on the TV screen, as a real public image, a political fact, my mind balked at taking him in.” Yet after Nixon was elected president in 1968-an event as rattling to liberals in its day as Donald Trump’s election was in 2016-Roth rose to the challenge with a parodic 1971 novel, Our Gang, christened a “masterpiece” by the critic Dwight Macdonald, which opens with epigraphs from Jonathan Swift and George Orwell about the menace of political lying.
Before Watergate consumed his presidency, Nixon offered his detractors a rich array of targets. Fittingly, Roth-whose fame just had hit new heights with the sexual taboo-shattering Portnoy’s Complaint-pounced on the president’s exploitation of the politics of abortion. Roe v. Wade hadn’t yet established the constitutionality of reproductive rights, but the issue was quickly growing contentious, especially for Catholics, who were abandoning the Democratic Party for the GOP. At the start of Our Gang, Roth’s Nixon stand-in, President Trick E. Dixon-whose speech Roth endows with pitch-perfect Nixonian smarm and stiltedness-explains that he “could have done the popular thing, of course, and come out against the sanctity of human life,” but would “rather be a one-term President and do what I believe is right than be a two-term President by taking an easy position like that.” Dixon/Nixon’s support for the forces of sexual repression elicits Roth’s sharpest and most consistent ridicule: The president’s chief ally in his reactionary sexual politics is the Reverend Billy Cupcake-a stand-in for the granddaddy of the religious right, Billy Graham-and at one point in the novel the Boy Scouts march on Washington protesting the president’s implicit endorsement of the act of sexual intercourse.
Roth didn’t go on to make a habit of lampooning presidents, but those parodic talents remained in his writer’s toolkit. In 1989, he wrote a mock interview for the New York Review of Books that flayed George H.W. Bush, a onetime supporter of Planned Parenthood, for preaching anti-abortion policies to woo social conservatives. Nowadays, the senior Bush’s long pattern of enabling the right’s worst elements has faded from memory, as old age suffuses him in a nostalgic glow. But two decades ago, Roth refused to spare the Connecticut Yankee-turned-Sunbelt oilman. Mimicking Bush’s blend of Wasp slang and Texas twang as ably as he had aped Nixon’s earnest logicality, Roth had the president propose a constitutional amendment banning menstruation and masturbation-after all, they meant that billions of eggs and sperm would not go on to become babies. “When I look at my grandkids out sailin and playin ball, and they’re great kids, and I think that they were once little defenseless eggs of the kind that women are,” Roth’s Bush says. “And every twenty-eight days. This is documented. Every single woman in America between puberty and menopause, every twenty-eight days, well, it’s just plain wrong.”
Roth’s scorn for the agents of sexual repression reached perhaps its most famous expression in a passage at the start of The Human Stain, his novel set amid the Republican drive to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998: “In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band: all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthorne (who, in the 1860s, lived not many miles from my door) identified in the incipient country of long ago as ‘the persecuting spirit’; all of them eager to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cozy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman’s ten-year-old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again. . I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend a human being lives here.”
By this point in his career, Roth had moved well beyond jokey parodies. But his humor was still thick and caustic-and, for a writer who spurned the idea of literature as bearing a message, the politics remained explicit and straightforward. The opening rant about Clinton’s sex trials neatly ties the persecuting spirit of Senator Joe Lieberman and other Washington scolds to the politically correct commissars of the modern academy. In the novel, a distinguished professor, Coleman Silk, is felled for joking about whether two perpetually absent students might be “spooks”-his innocuous comment being construed, irredeemably, as a racial slur. Anchored in an explosive secret, Silk’s life story becomes an occasion for exploring the burdens of race, family, ambition and the fight to safeguard one’s own individuality in a time of pious social policing.
The understanding that censoriousness and groupthink know no political quarter-they come, in Roth’s writing, from the left as much as the right-lifts his political writing beyond the realm of punditry and into the richer worlds of the personal and the psychological. It’s the passion, pain, sadness, jealousy, ambivalence and other emotions with which his characters discuss and infuse politics that render certain passages indelible years after reading them-at least to me. I devoured Deception two decades ago but still remember vividly Roth’s protagonist’s frustration at being goaded, at a highfalutin London literary dinner with apologists for Fidel Castro and the Sandinistas, into arguing over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “I defended Harry Truman against war crimes charges until one a.m.!” the character Philip-a typical semi-fictionalized Roth doppelganger-sputters to his British lover. Those brief, hilarious passages do more to capture bien pensant anti-American British leftists than could any op-ed.
Likewise, what stronger indictment could there be of the callowness of the early Cold War “progressive” left than the nightly disputes, in I Married a Communist, between the young protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman-devoted, like the communist teacher he admires, to Vice President Henry Wallace, founder of that era’s Progressive Party (correctly suspected of being a tool of the communists)-and Zuckerman’s wise, hard-bitten father, who insists, “Your man is only going to deny the Democrats the White House. . And if we get the Republicans, that will mean the suffering in this country that it has always meant.” Meanwhile, unforgettably, Nathan’s pesky little brother “liked to repeat to me, in an exaggeratedly exasperated voice, ‘A vote for Wallace is a vote for Dewey.'” Roth deftly makes clear that the older Nathan, who narrates the book, can see what his younger self could not: the futility and even self-defeating nature of utopian politics.
Finally, in 2004 came The Plot Against America. An alternative history of the 1940s, in which the pro-Nazi aviator Charles Lindbergh becomes president and brings fascism to the United States, the novel inescapably provoked comparisons to the situation at the time of its publication: the George W. Bush administration’s hostility to wartime dissent and civil liberties, the post-9/11 revival of global anti-Semitism. Even Roth’s description of Lindbergh as the “young president in his famous aviator’s windbreaker” evoked, intentionally or not, Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” strut on the flight deck of USS Abraham Lincoln. Roth denied firmly that he was opining or even thinking about Bush. Even ignoring the resonances with the present, the novel’s grasp of political detail was characteristically sure: the exquisitely named and eerily plausible “Just Folks” program, which under the phony banner of national unity sent Jewish children from their families to gentile outposts in Kentucky and elsewhere; the all-too-familiar tortured rationales for backing Lindbergh offered by a bourgeois rabbi; the approving New York Times editorial when the anti-fascist radio broadcaster Walter Winchell loses his job for “borderline scruples and questionable taste” in attacking the president.
Still, an avid news reader, Roth couldn’t help being informed, however obliquely, by his times. As the sexual McCarthyism of the Clinton years colored the story of Coleman Silk, so the ugly and divisive patriotism wars of the Bush years backlit the story of The Plot Against America‘s protagonist, a fictional “Philip Roth.” Roth himself-who, in an essay for the New York Times, called Bush “a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one”-did allow that the 43rd president “reaffirmed for me the maxim that informed the writing of all these books and that makes our lives as Americans as precarious as anyone else’s: all the assurances are provisional, even here in a 200-year-old democracy.”
Those words sound prescient today. So do Roth’s historical reminders of Lindbergh’s esteem for Nordic peoples, his “America First” rallying cry, his eagerness to lock arms with a foreign autocrat and the anti-Semitism he cultivated in certain corners of the populace. If the political mood of the Bush years brought forth The Plot Against America, one can only imagine what flights of inventions Roth might have embarked on under the Trump regime had he not sworn off writing novels in 2010. Perhaps we can steal a glimpse in some emails published in early 2017, in which Roth once more expressed the stupefaction at political reality that he had professed years earlier in “Writing American Fiction.” “It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary President like Charles Lindbergh than an actual President like Donald Trump,” Roth noted to the New Yorker‘s Judith Thurman. “It isn’t Trump as a character, a human type-the real-estate type, the callow and callous killer capitalist-that outstrips the imagination. It is Trump as President of the United States.”