The Multiplying ‘Philip Roths’

In “Borges and I,” a classic page-long story by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer presents the reader with a conundrum: How are we to distinguish between Borges, the living, breathing human being, and the affected and somewhat dandyish persona his writings have helped create? Although the two do share certain tastes and characteristics, it’s “the other one” who has a “perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things,” Borges writes.

Ultimately, the author concludes that, though he is mortal, this writerly projection of himself is the one that will endure.“I do not know,” the essay concludes, “which of us has written this page.”

Something of this strange dilemma—untangling who an artist actually is from the inflated version of himself he creates on the page—comes to mind while reading Julius Taranto’s How I Won a Nobel Prize. His novel is a gleefully irreverent satire of so-called cancel culture, virtue signaling, and early-21st-century hypocrisy set largely on the campus of the Rubin Institute, a fictional center of higher learning staffed by an intellectually gifted but morally bereft faculty that has been shunned by former employers and at Rubin can pursue both research and perversions with impunity.

Here, Helen, a brilliant young physicist, arrives with her skeptical and performatively “woke” husband, Hew, to work on a superconductor project alongside her graduate adviser, Perry Smoot, who was exiled from Cornell after violating the university’s code of conduct, i.e. sleeping with a student. Though indisputably a genius, Smoot, Taranto writes, “was as dumb as anyone, apparently, when it came to sex.” For her part, Helen is guilty only of the crime of remaining in the academy, doomed to follow her adviser to the one suspect institution still willing to employ him.

In this libertarian paradise, which is referred to by its detractors as “Rape Island,” one building is named after William F. Buckley Jr.; R. Kelly roams freely; an enormous, phallic tower at the center of campus is known as “The Endowment.”

Then, in a surprising development that takes place around page 50, Philip Roth shows up.

Well, not the actual Philip Roth—Taranto’s character goes by the name of Leopold Lens—but he is so clearly based on Roth that it seems to have been barely worth the bother of inventing this parallel-universe great Jewish American novelist: Lens, the defender of the faith of the literary canon; Lens, the onetime acolyte and later nemesis of Saul Bellow; Lens, who came to prefer a more bucolic setting over New York’s Upper West Side; Lens, the unrequited coveter of the Nobel Prize; Lens, the notoriously libidinous wooer of sometimes-famous women (in real life, Claire Bloom; in Taranto’s version, Goldie Hawn and Kathleen Turner).

Though Lens himself, like Jorge Luis Borges, takes pains to differentiate Leo, the mortal human, from Leopold, the celebrated author whom Helen knows only by reputation (“Those two are not the same, and have never met,” he says), Taranto is less concerned with such a separation. In creating Lens, he casts a Rothian caricature (“a novelist, a satirist, an iconoclast,” he writes) with the express purpose of deploying him to do battle in today’s culture wars.

One suspects that Taranto is still grieving the loss of Roth’s ferocious wit and sense of moral outrage and wishes the author were alive to pillory Millenials and Gen-Z who have, in Lens’s view, embraced wokeness as their theology. In the same way that Roth excoriated the pieties and hypocrisies of postwar America with a still-unparalleled fury, Taranto has created his own Rothian golem in the person of Lens to say what he presumes Roth would have said about today’s young, quick-to-take-offense Puritans. “People are woke like they are saved,” Lens opines, adding that the youth of today “do have a religion: it is the religion of the mob.”

Encountering Leopold Lens over the course of Taranto’s novel, the reader may feel overcome by a sense of déjà vu, not only because of Lens’s resemblance to Philip Roth himself but also because of his similarity to other fictional versions of Roth, whose ubiquity as a character in contemporary pop culture might be approaching that of, say, Ernest Hemingway, J. D. Salinger, or Emily Dickinson. Taranto may be the most recent author to introduce a version of Philip Roth into his fiction, but he is far from the first (in Roth’s own lifetime, even, John Updike created a decidedly Rothian novelist named Henry Bech for his trio of novels about a neurotic Jewish American writer).

The past few years have seen a multiplicity of Roths: In Lisa Halliday’s shimmeringly intelligent and formally inventive 2018 novel, Asymmetry, about half of which is concerned with an affair between a young writer and editor and a much-older author, he is the witty and erudite Ezra Blazer, who shares not only much of Roth’s biography but also the author’s zip code, his love for baseball, his taste in music (e.g., Gabriel Fauré), his physical ailments, his penchant for mashing up Truth and Fiction—those particular categories were “kicked aside by the novelist for good reason to begin with,” he says.

[Read: The relentless Philip Roth]

In Alex Ross Perry’s 2014 film, Listen Up, Philip, whose title credits and poster art borrow the font used for the covers of Roth’s 1960s and ’70s novels, Roth seems to have inspired both its antihero, the angry young novelist Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman), and his self-appointed mentor, the aging literary lion Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), who counsels Friedman to stay true to his art by maintaining a life of selfishness and isolation away from the distractions of urban life.

Roth’s spirit imbues the titular young writer in Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.; Roth’s novel When She Was Good and his reputation serve as totems in an episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls that concerns a celebrated author’s alleged history of sexual assault; and Roth is an off-screen presence in the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. In that series, the show’s heroine, Midge Maisel, is engaged to be married to Roth—though she breaks off their engagement because, she says, he doesn’t make her laugh.

Meanwhile, before other artists created their own Roths, there were the Roths the author himself invented. Nathan Zuckerman, whose career serves as a distorted mirror image of Roth’s, appears in nine Roth novels, starting out as a brash young literary man proudly defiling the horrified Jewish and literary establishment and ending up as an elder statesman mourning the loss of his literary and sexual potency. And, in the ultimate act of self-mythologizing, Roth, perhaps not satisfied with a mere Zuckerman, created a character named Philip Roth, who, in books such as Deception and Patrimony, blurs the line between autobiography and autoeroticism even further; perhaps the most notable of these authorial appearances comes in the 1993 novel Operation Shylock, in which Roth finds himself bedeviled by a man impersonating him in Israel at the time of the trial of John Demjanjuk. “This struggle for supremacy between Roth and ‘Roth’ could rage on undisturbed until the cataclysmic end,” Roth writes of “Roth.”

Though Roth may have created these alternative “Roths” as a form of self-defense—writing his own biography while he was still alive and at the same time anticipating and disarming his critics—he was also inadvertently offering an invitation to authors to think of him as a character there for the taking.

Clearly, there is something in this Roth, this exemplar of the brash, outspoken truth-teller with blazing intelligence, rapier wit, and voracious intellectual and sexual appetites, that has managed to endure. His humor, his audacity, his fearlessness and his willingness to offend, so inescapably present in the second half of the 20th century, are all sorely lacking today, which is probably why so many, including Taranto, have felt a need to resurrect him.

And yet, despite the seemingly constant presence of these fictionalized Philip Roths, it’s worth asking now, five years after Roth’s death, whether they have eclipsed the actual work that Roth produced, or any true reckoning with the man himself. Outside of the syllabi of 20th-century-Jewish-American-novel courses and a few short stories (the early, funny ones) in high-school anthologies, will the man’s literary output enjoy the same immortality as that of the persona he created?

For a time, he seemed to have become a figure very much like E. I. Lonoff, the aging author in The Ghost Writer, one of Roth’s early Nathan Zuckerman novels, a heroic character “who came to mean so much to bookish Americans” and “who seemed to say something new and wrenching to Gentiles about Jews, and to Jews about themselves.” And yet, toward the end, Roth had seemingly become what he refers to in Exit Ghost, his final Nathan Zuckerman novel: one of the “no-longers.” Spokesman for a generation, perhaps, but one that had fallen out of fashion.

Eternally passed over for the Nobel Prize, which John Updike and Lisa Halliday were either kind or cruel enough to bestow upon him in Bech at Bay and Asymmetry, respectively, and betrayed by lugubrious and self-serious cinematic adaptations of some of his greatest works that made the novels on which they were based seem less profound than they were (for example, American Pastoral), he nevertheless would seemingly have secured his place in the literary canon with his definitive biography, published in 2021.

Until, in a development that could have formed the basis for a scene in a Roth novel or an aside in one written by Taranto, Roth’s handpicked biographer, Blake Bailey, found himself the subject of deeply disturbing sexual allegations, the result being that Philip Roth: The Biography was pulled from publication by W. W. Norton. It was subsequently republished by Skyhorse Publishing, which has made a name for itself with such ripe-for-the-Rubin-Institute books as Apropos of Nothing, by Woody Allen, and The Real Anthony Fauci, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

[Read: Philip Roth’s terrible gift of intimacy]

The scandal surrounding the publication, unpublication, and republication of the biography served to confirm the prejudices that Roth’s critics already had against him, given that the author of Portnoy’s Complaint and The Breast had, in the #MeToo era, become somewhat suspect for his own ribald and unblinking depictions of sex acts. At one time, these had been lauded for their frankness; now they register as either awkward oversharing or rank misogyny. And, unmoored from their historical context, Roth’s blistering jeremiads—against, say, Jewish mothers or political correctness—can sound like merely unhinged, filibuster-length harangues. Roth’s choice of biographer came to seem like the literary equivalent of having flown on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, and seemed to further condemn the author from beyond the grave, cementing his reputation as a caricature of himself—selfish, self-obsessed, and sexually depraved.     

Today, the man seems to have been, in a sense, relegated to a virtual version of Taranto’s Rubin Institute, existing either as an irreverent genius able to cut through societal pieties or as an offensively satyrlike figure from a bygone era, or, perhaps, serving as an embodiment of liberal hypocrisy, decrying others for failing to live up to standards he did not meet himself. However one chooses to view Roth today, it’s a cruel irony that the author, who mostly shunned life as a public figure—he did few readings or interviews, and signed his novels only for the bookseller who operated a table outside Zabar’s—would be known more for what he represented than for what he wrote.

“A man’s character isn’t his fate; a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his character,”  Roth wrote in Operation Shylock. Though, honestly, I no longer remember which Roth said that.