Few American writers have ignited such fierce adoration, or such blistering critique, as Philip Roth. A literary firebrand who wielded his pen like a scalpel, Roth spent five decades slicing through the myths of American life with ruthless precision and dark, subversive wit. His novels were grenades lobbed at polite society: Portnoy’s Complaint exploded sexual repression into uproarious, filthy confession; The Human Stain skewered the hypocrisies of race and political correctness; American Pastoral unraveled the American dream with the slow, devastating pull of a thread from a sweater. Roth didn’t just write about the American psyche, he pinned it to the dissection table, prodding its contradictions with a smirk and a middle finger.
Yet today, as the literary world grapples with shifting cultural values, Roth’s legacy stands at a crossroads. Was he a fearless truth-teller, exposing the raw nerves of identity, desire, and power? Or a provocateur whose transgressions now read as indulgent, even regressive? The debate rages, and few are better equipped to navigate it than Matthew Shipe.
A leading Roth scholar and critic, Shipe has spent years excavating the tensions that animate Roth’s work: the clash of politics and art, the specter of masculinity in freefall, the thorny dance between Jewish identity and American assimilation. At Washington University in St. Louis, Shipe’s scholarship has sharpened the conversation around Roth’s post-9/11 reckoning with a nation in crisis, and his own fraught place in its canon.
In this no-holds-barred conversation, we challenge Shipe on Roth’s paradoxes, confront the critiques head-on, and ask: What happens when a writer who lived to provoke becomes the one under the microscope? The answers might just redefine how we read Roth, and how we reckon with the idols of literature’s past.
Charles Carlini: You’ve written that Roth’s work resists easy political classification. In an era when many demand moral clarity from their artists, how should we read a writer whose politics were as mercurial—and often as maddening—as Roth’s?
Matthew Shipe: There’s a wonderful moment in I Married a Communist (1998) where Nathan Zuckerman recalls one of his college professors, Leo Glucksman, railing against explicitly political fiction. For Glucksman, the “task
Apart from his gleefully savage Nixon satire Our Gang (1971), Roth’s most political novels—Operation Shylock (1993), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist, and The Plot Against America (2004)—embrace ambiguity rather than offering clear political answers. The questions that close American Pastoral—“And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs” (423)—are genuine, a shared act of grappling by both Zuckerman and Roth with the seismic shifts Vietnam exposed. As Roth notes in Reading Myself and Others (1975), the 1960s were “the demythologizing decade” when “the very nature of American things, yielded and collapsed overnight” (87–88). Even The Plot Against America—read as a Bush-era allegory and later as a prophecy of Trump—resists simple parallels. Its closing insistence on the psychic rupture caused by the fictional Lindbergh presidency makes clear that Roth’s interest was not in political score-settling but in exploring how history’s convulsions unsettle the foundations of ordinary life.
Roth’s politics, then, were less mercurial than generational. His loyalty to the Democratic Party was shaped by a childhood steeped in Roosevelt’s New Deal and the patriotic fervor of World War II. As he reflects in Reading Myself and Others, his early view of America was forged by wartime propaganda. He chafed at the cultural conformity of the 1950s—a theme running through much of his fiction, sharpened in I Married a Communist and Indignation (2008)—but it was the upheaval of the late 1960s that crystallized his political outlook. That period revealed what Zuckerman in American Pastoral calls the “indigenous American berserk”: the recurring eruptions of violence and chaos that punctuate U.S. history. Today, Roth would likely be considered a moderate Democrat. His late fiction, beginning with the American trilogy, oscillates between a self-critical nostalgia for the Newark of his youth and a sober reckoning with the country’s enduring flaws and betrayals.
CC: Roth’s men are famously, or infamously, entangled in their own anxieties—about sex, power, cultural displacement. In what ways do you see Roth interrogating masculinity, and in what ways does he merely indulge it?
MS: This is an excellent question, and I’m not sure there’s an easy answer. At its best, Roth’s fiction interrogates the impulses that drive his male protagonists, often laying bare the self-destructive forces behind their worst decisions. The Dying Animal (2001) is a good example: Roth not only exposes but, I’d argue, critiques the more troubling attitudes toward sex and women embodied by David Kepesh. The novel’s form helps make the critique land—Kepesh is addressing an unnamed interlocutor, and we watch his confidence in his sexual worldview, rooted in the freedoms of the Sexual Revolution, steadily crumble. Roth allows his characters’ positions to be challenged: some of the novel’s most persuasive arguments come from Kepesh’s son, Kenny, who excoriates his father’s sexual politics and his justification for abandoning Kenny’s mother, and from his much younger lover, Consuela Castillo, whose breast cancer diagnosis further complicates the novel’s sexual dynamics.
That said, some of Roth’s later work does seem to indulge rather than interrogate male misbehavior. The Humbling (2009) is a prime offender, a thin reworking of Sabbath’s Theater (1995) without the earlier novel’s richness or self-awareness. Sabbath’s remains, for me, one of Roth’s towering achievements, alongside American Pastoral and The Counterlife (1986), precisely because it offers his most harrowing portrait of masculine pathology. It’s Roth at his dirtiest and most sex-obsessed, yes, but also at his most moving, as Mickey Sabbath wrestles with the losses that have shaped him since his brother’s death in the Second World War. The Humbling, by contrast, feels thin and unnuanced, lacking the grief-filled complexity that gives Sabbath’s its power.
Some of Roth’s post-Portnoy’s Complaint work falls into the same trap of provocation for provocation’s sake. Books like The Breast or the little-known story “On the Air” (1970) feel overly indulgent, as if straining to shock. Even the opening section of The Professor of Desire (1977)—a colleague once joked that Kepesh’s Swedish threesome in that book is what cost Roth the Nobel—leans into transgression without offering much critical distance. These moments illustrate the problematic attitudes toward sex your question points to, but without the nuance or self-interrogation that make Roth’s best work so compelling.
CC: Is Roth’s portrayal of Jewish identity ultimately an act of self-laceration, cultural critique, or something closer to performance? And who do you think he believed his Jewish audience was—if he believed in one at all?
MS: I would argue that, for Roth, identity in all its forms was always a kind of performance. One of my favorite moments in his entire oeuvre comes at the end of The Counterlife, when Nathan Zuckerman declares that he has no fixed self at all, only a performance that requires another person to play against. In that novel, Nathan is largely ambivalent about his Jewishness. He is baffled by his younger brother’s decision to immigrate to Israel, and it isn’t until Nathan relocates to England with his new wife that he feels most Jewish, suggesting, for Roth, that identity is shaped by where we are and whom we are with.
A similar idea runs through The Human Stain. Coleman Silk, an African American man who chooses to “pass” as Jewish, embraces the idea of being a counterpuncher. A former boxer, Silk revels in defining himself through others’ perceptions of him—again, identity as performance. And yet Roth complicates this postmodern fluidity in both novels. The Counterlife ends with Nathan affirming circumcision as a kind of fixed marker of Jewish identity, while Coleman’s carefully constructed persona collapses when he is accused of making racist remarks to his African American students.
As for whether Roth was conscious of his Jewish audience, undeniably so. He repeatedly insisted he wanted to be read as an American writer, not narrowly as a Jewish-American novelist, yet he remained highly aware of the writers (Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud) and critics (notably Irving Howe, who famously reappraised Roth’s career after Portnoy’s Complaint) who shaped that conversation. As a young writer, Roth seemed almost eager to provoke the Jewish establishment. The backlash to some of the stories in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) surely made him conscious of that audience, and Portnoy’s Complaint feels like a deliberate provocation. Over time, though, his relationship with that readership shifted. Books like Patrimony (1991), his tender memoir of his father’s final year, seem to seek reconciliation, while novels like Operation Shylock and Sabbath’s Theater appear deliberately crafted to estrange that same audience all over again.
CC: You’ve argued that Roth’s later work grapples with a kind of post-9/11 American disillusionment. Does Roth mourn the collapse of American ideals, or does he seem to take a kind of bitter satisfaction in their unraveling?
MS: I wouldn’t say Roth celebrated or took pleasure in American disillusionment, nor would I tie it directly to 9/11. The American Trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain), all published before 9/11, is already elegiac in its treatment of American history. Those novels insist that the myth of American innocence was always just that—a myth whose façade had finally been stripped away.
Roth’s politics in the new century, after 9/11, are more complicated. Exit Ghost offers a useful lens on his late outlook. Midway through the novel, Nathan Zuckerman, now old, frail, and struggling with memory loss, watches the 2004 election returns with two much younger writers who are devastated by Bush’s reelection. Zuckerman absorbs the news with weary calm and compares it to what he perceives to have been the far more traumatic shocks of his youth: Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, and Kent State. “It’s amazing how much punishment we can take,” he thinks as his younger companions struggle to accept the result (86).
This resignation, whether it mirrors Roth’s own politics, feels central to his late work. It suggests a kind of political belatedness, less outrage than hard-won perspective. In interviews after 9/11, Roth repeatedly worked to puncture the idea of American innocence, insisting that the nation had always had blood on its hands.
CC: There’s long been a tension between Roth’s literary virtuosity and his reputation as a provocateur. Do you think critics have leaned too heavily into his “bad boy” image at the expense of his philosophical depth—or is that image integral to understanding his project?
MS: Some of the philosophical depth of Roth’s work—the seriousness of the questions he asks throughout his career—probably gets lost amid the uproar his fiction has caused and can still provoke. That tension may have eased somewhat. Critics now tend to focus on the “serious” late Roth, a shift reflected in which novels make it onto college syllabi. When Roth appears on a syllabus, it is usually with The Plot Against America, American Pastoral, or The Ghost Writer (1979), where the bad-boy persona is less prominent.
As for critical work, Roth studies has generally struck a good balance: acknowledging what is problematic in his writing and the provocative questions it raises while also attending to the larger, more enduring questions his fiction explores.
CC: When you teach Roth today, especially to younger readers, what’s the sticking point? Is it the sex? The politics? Or something else entirely?
MS: Another good question. I’ve taught two undergraduate seminars on Roth since my book came out, and I’ve been impressed by how seriously students engage with his work. If there’s a stumbling block, it’s usually the sex and Roth’s depictions of women. Some of our best conversations last semester revolved around how to read a character like the sexually liberated Drenka in Sabbath’s Theater. Students struggle more with Portnoy’s Complaint, where they often feel—understandably—overwhelmed by Alex Portnoy’s graphic confessions. Portnoy’s feels very much of its cultural moment; I remember one student being astonished to learn it was the second-bestselling book of 1969. I’m not sure how well it speaks to today’s undergraduates.
Beyond the sexual content, it can be difficult to convey the literary culture that shaped Roth’s career. His sense of vocation was formed by the almost religious importance of literature instilled in him during his college years. Even explaining Roth’s references can be a challenge—last year I had great fun trying to explain who Norman Mailer was to my students—but it’s harder still to capture the cultural climate that informed so much of his work. My students tended to find firmer footing with the later books like The Human Stain and Exit Ghost, which feel closer to our own moment.
CC: To what extent do you think Roth’s discomfort with identity politics was a principled literary stance—and when did it start to sound like a cranky refusal to engage with the changing world?
MS: I’m not sure there’s a single clear answer. It’s probably a bit of both. The last few times I’ve taught The Human Stain—Roth’s novel most directly engaged with identity politics and political correctness—I’ve been fascinated by my students’ reactions. It’s a book that, I suspect, would receive a very different critical reception if published today. Even so, my students were drawn to it. The questions Roth poses clearly resonated with them, even if the novel carries more than a trace of crankiness.
CC: Given the ongoing reassessment of the American literary canon, where does Roth stand now? Is he still a pillar—or is he increasingly a relic?
MS: Literary standing is notoriously hard to measure and even harder to predict. After the Blake Bailey scandal—Bailey’s biography of Roth was withdrawn following accusations of sexual misconduct, though later republished by Skyhorse—there was plenty of speculation about whether Roth’s reputation would suffer. I’m not sure it has. While Roth may not be assigned in college courses as frequently as he once was, his work still holds a prominent place in the cultural conversation.
The recent HBO adaptation of The Plot Against America (2020) is proof of how powerfully Roth’s late work continues to resonate with our political moment. And the arc of Roth’s career—a sustained run of brilliance beginning with The Counterlife and continuing almost uninterrupted through The Plot Against America—gives him, alongside figures like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, as strong a claim as anyone to being read a century from now.
CC: What’s the most common misunderstanding people have about Roth, in your view? And why do you think that particular misreading persists?
MS: This may surprise some, but I’d argue that Roth was a far more experimental writer than he’s often credited with being. His work as editor of Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe series—an imprint that introduced American readers to writers like Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, and Danilo Kiš—was a formative experience and helped propel his remarkable run of books in the 1980s and 90s.
Roth played with literary form far more than many acknowledge. The formal experimentation in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, and even in a seemingly more traditional novel like The Ghost Writer, is striking and rewards close reading.
CC: Let’s turn the tables for a moment: if you could sit Roth down for one unfiltered, no-holds-barred question, what would you ask him—and do you think he’d actually answer it?
MS: We might spend the first hour just talking baseball or music. But I’d love to ask him what he’d make of Trump’s re-election—I suspect he’d have plenty to say.
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