Re-Reading Roth

Philip Roth’s novels were very important to the early thinking that eventually led to the book I’m writing Civilization and Its Discontents, mostly because I disagreed with so much of what his works seemed to imply about the tension between sexual desire and family life. (In making that argument, Roth was, of course, carrying on in the long Augustinian tradition I criticize, particularly in it’s Freudian version, although Roth is in many ways a critic of Freud.)

It occurred to me to re-read some of Roth’s books, as I near the end of this project and I’ve discovered two things. One is that there are many more voices in Roth’s work than I saw when I first read him. The second is something that I’ve always known, reading Roth is an immense pleasure–so many wonderful lines, carefully constructed and beautiful sentences and paragraphs, clever but not obtrusive plots, and a wonderful capacity to adjust his language and point of view to the character of both his narrators and those they are writing about. The Professor Desire was always one of my favorites. (I knew a Helen). Today I re-read the last Kepesh book, The Dying Animal. It’s an extraordinary tour de force in which the ending powerfully calls into doubt Kepesh’s ideology of sexual freedom.