A Measured Look At Roth As The Writer Turns 80

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

Today, is Philip Roth's 80th birthday. He's widely acknowledged as America's greatest living novelist. It's an event that seems all the more momentous as Roth recently announced his retirement from writing fiction. In connection with his birthday there's a new documentary called "Philip Roth Unmasked" that will be shown as part of the PBS American Master Series March 29th.

Our critic-at-large John Powers, a huge Roth fan, has seen the documentary and says it got him thinking about how you celebrate a writer whose virtues aren't high-minded and pleasant.

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: In Chinua Achebe's novel "The Anthills of the Savannah," one of the characters says: Poets don't give prescriptions. They give headaches. The same is true of novelists, none more so than Philip Roth. If any writer has ever enjoyed rattling people's skulls, it's this son of Newark, New Jersey, who's currently enjoying something of a victory lap in the media on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

The celebration reaches its peak in a new documentary - "Philip Roth Unmasked" - that will screen on PBS next week as part of the "American Masters" series. Now, there's no doubt that Roth is a master, and not just an American one. His first book, "Goodbye, Columbus," won the National Book Award in 1960, and he's been racking up prizes ever since.

From the beginning, Roth was nobody's idea of the artist who sits invisibly behind his work paring his fingernails. The hilariously obscene "Portnoy's Complaint" made him into something of a pop icon, and his later creation of fictional alter egos have let readers spy on imaginary versions of everything from his fame and back pain to all of the hot sex he presumably was having.

Even as Roth grappled with the elusive nature of the self, he also reached outward. His novels tackle topics that stir the hornet's nest: sex, Jewishness, politics, marriage, Israel, the legacy of the 1960s. Roth has always been a writer willing to butcher sacred cows and to talk about things that others think taboo. Whether riffing on masturbation or being irreverent about Anne Frank, he has ripped through illusions and bad faith like a man stripping cobwebs out of an attic.

Of course, it takes enormous confidence to say what other people aren't willing to. In "Philip Roth Unmasked" he talks about his willingness to go for broke on the page.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "PHILIP ROTH UNMASKED")

PHILIP ROTH: I was very curious as a write as to how far I could go. What happens if you go further? It's best, certainly in the early stages of the book, to abandon self-censorship. Do whatever you want to do. Let it be. Shame isn't for writers. You have to be shameless. You can't worry about being decorous. This doesn't mean that you have to be obscene and crazy and smear your pages with feces. That's not the point. But shame won't do.

I couldn't have written "Sabbath's Theater" if I felt shame. I couldn't have written - I feel plenty of shame in my own life, don't get me wrong. I'm just as shame-ridden as the next person is, but when I sit down to write, I'm free from shame.

POWERS: As you can hear, Roth speaks lucidly and well. He's really fun to listen to. And in this documentary he comes across as a smart, thoughtful, rather harmless man who loved his parents and devoted 60 years to his craft. This isn't really surprising. After all, it's the nature of the "American Masters" series to be laudatory and upbeat about culture, to suggest that the person being celebrated has done work that's somehow noble and good for you.

Now, this might be a plausible approach to a literary politician like John Updike. But Roth is a guy who once wrote: For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence. And this idea reverberates through his work. Here's a writer who specializes in anger, sarcasm, iconoclasm, dirtiness, atheism, comedy and sexual attitudes that smack of misogyny.

While "Philip Roth Unmasked" doesn't completely ignore his dark ferocity, it tiptoes around it. We learn little about his personal life, which was messy enough to prompt his ex-wife, actress Claire Bloom, to spend 150 pages of a book excoriating his manipulative narcissism.

Nor do we get much insight into what's obvious from Roth's work - his ambition, his princely sense of entitlement, his use of fury as fuel, his tendency toward political sanctimony, and his way of seeing women as one big perk of fame.

Watching "Philip Roth Unmasked," I couldn't help but compare it to his 1988 autobiography, "The Facts," where Roth spends the first 157 pages presenting himself pretty much the way he does in the documentary: as a smart, hardworking, somewhat flawed Jewish guy from Newark.

But Roth is too honest to leave it at that. He'd no more let us believe that he's actually this boringly simple than he'd let himself believe in the balm of an afterlife. And so he ends "The Facts" with an imaginary letter in which one of his alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman, scrutinizes this autobiography and rips into all the ways that Roth has smoothed out the truth, creating an official version that sounds honest enough but actually leaves out the pulp of life in all its fury, mire and nastiness.

In Roth's novella "The Dying Animal," the narrator talks about learning to play classical music. Like all enjoyable things, he says, it has unenjoyable parts to it. The same is surely true of learning to appreciate Philip Roth himself.

GROSS: John Powers is film and TV critic for Vogue and Vogue.com. His list of suggested books by Philip Roth is on our Tumblr at nprfreshair.tumblr.com. Happy Birthday, Philip Roth. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.