Philip Roth’s American Portraits and American Prophecy

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 December 2018

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

The novelist and short-story writer Philip Roth died in May at the age of eighty-five. In novels like “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “The Human Stain,” and “American Pastoral,” Roth anatomized postwar American life—particularly the lives of Jewish people in the Northeast. And in works like “The Ghost Writer” and “The Plot Against America,” he speculated on how the shadow of authoritarianism might fall over the United States. The breadth and depth of Roth’s work kept him a vital literary figure throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and established him among the most respected writers of fiction in American history. David Remnick speaks with Roth’s official biographer, Blake Bailey, about Roth’s life and career. Judith Thurman, Claudia Roth Pierpont, and Lisa Halliday discuss the portrayals of women in Roth’s work and the accusations of misogyny that he has faced. And, finally, we hear an interview with the author, from 2003, when he sat down with David Remnick for the BBC. Plus: the actor Liev Schreiber reads excerpts from Roth’s fiction. This episode originally aired on July 20, 2018.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:10.5	Abolishing death.
0:13.8	A thrilling thought.
0:16.9	For all that, he wasn't the first person on or off a subway to have it, have it desperately.
0:25.4	Turning life back like a clock in the fall, just taking it down off the wall and winding it back and winding it back until you're dead all appear like standard time.
0:46.9	Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We just heard a passage from Philip Roth's favorite novel of his from 1995, Sabbath's theater read by Leif Schreiber.
0:54.3	Philip Roth died on May 22, 2018.
0:58.0	Today we're going to look at Roth's remarkable contributions to literature in books like
1:02.5	American Pastoral, The Ghost Writer, and the book that absolutely changed his career, Portnoy's
1:09.0	Complaint.
1:10.6	Philip Roth published some of his earliest stories in the New Yorker in the late 50s,
1:14.6	and in his following 30-odd books,
1:17.0	Philip was many things, a realist, a satirist, a post-modernist,
1:21.0	a writer about lust, identity, Jewishness, the self.
1:25.2	And as he entered his 60s, he became one of the great chroniclers of
1:29.6	the 20th century in America. Roth's writing provided a vision of life during and after the
1:35.1	great war, and he portrayed the chaos created by the conflict in Vietnam. He even anticipated the
1:41.4	rise of a Trump-like figure in the form of Charles Limburg in his book
1:46.0	The Plot Against America.
1:47.8	He was always thinking about what made America what it is, which we talked about in 2003.
1:56.0	Times aren't shocking if they're finely modulated distinctions. Times are shocking when there's a great clash of things in a
2:05.6	society. Life during the French Revolution was shocking. Do you know Chaffor, the great French epigramist,
	...

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