Philip Roth: Mensch

Fans of Philip Roth should make every effort to see the PBS American Masters Philip Roth: Unmasked - not sure why PBS is showing it so infrequently (we had to DVR a 4:30 a.m. "broadcast"), but it's a really important and informative piece of work, helping us see and understand Roth and his work in a new light - or at least a brighter light. As far as I know, Roth has rarely if every done broadcast-media interviews (at least since the 60s and the Portnoy phenomenon), and I don't know that he ever did reading tours and he hasn't taught since the early 60s - he's not a recluse or anything like that, but he just has generally shunned public appearances and has let his work speak for itself - good for him. In this 90-minute piece, which is an extended interview over several sessions, in which Roth discusses the entire arc of his career (we hear and see only him, not the interviewer/photographer), interspersed with a few comments from personal friends and from some other writers, of varying perspicacity. A few of my observations: first, this program reinforces the astounding scope of Roth's contribution to American literature; if there had been any doubt about the greatness of his work, this piece, hearing his work discussed in sequence and in total, puts those doubts to rest. It became clear to me how his work breaks into several phases: early pieces, in which he was an explicitly Jewish-American writers; the break at Portnoy into a writer who focused on narrative voice and a establishment of a strong central character who superficially stood in for the author (more on that in a moment), the third phase in which politics and world events and great themes entered his fiction, beginning with the Counterlife and including such masterworks as American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, Operation Shylock, and the Plot Against America; and the final phase of shorter works, almost novellas, with Nemesis as a career capstone encompassing all of the above themes. Extraordinary. Second, Roth seems like a true mensch: a good son, brother, and friend; funny, without being gross or crude, affable, rightly proud of his work but not egotistic, endearingly self-effacing, honest, proud of his family, protective of some of his privacy (says almost nothing about his marriages or other relationships with women), devoted to his work, and a man with great taste (beautiful and understated furnishings in the famous writing cabin we've all read about but never seen). Third, Roth is wrong about one thing: his first books weren't kicked around because of the language or the sex but because he portrayed American Jews in a comical and as a distinct ethnic group, not fully "assimilated" - nobody else had done this; also, Franzen is wrong: Roth is not great because there are so many versions of himself in his fiction. He does not write about himself (except in his few pieces of nonfiction) - he expresses himself and his ideas, which is different. Fourth: what's with Sabbath's Theater, which a few on this program called his masterwork? I read it only once but remember it as psychologically dark and pathological sexual - although I loved the section in which Sabbath returns to childhood haunt on the Jersey Shore. I'll have to re-read the book. And I'll have to take the Roth tour in Newark (who knew?) - this program shows surprisingly little of the scenes and places of his childhood.