Literature | Philip Roth, fearless and celebrated author, dies at 85

Philip Roth in 2008

Philip Roth, the prize-winning novelist and fearless narrator of sex, death, assimilation and fate, from the comic madness of “Portnoy’s Complaint” to the elegiac lyricism of “American Pastoral,” died yesterday [Macau time] at age 85.

Roth’s literary agent, Andrew Wylie, told The Associated Press that he died in a New York City hospital of congestive heart failure.

Author of more than 25 books, Roth was a fierce satirist and uncompromising realist, confronting readers in a bold, direct style that scorned false sentiment or hopes for heavenly reward. He was an atheist who swore allegiance to earthly imagination, whether devising pornographic functions for raw liver or indulging romantic fantasies about Anne Frank. In “The Plot Against America,” published in 2004, he placed his own family under the anti-Semitic reign of President Charles Lindbergh. In 2010, in “Nemesis,” he subjected his native New Jersey to a polio epidemic.

He was among greatest writers never to win the Nobel Prize. But he received virtually every other literary honor, including two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle prizes and, in 1998, the Pulitzer for “American Pastoral.” He was in his 20s when he won his first award and awed critics and fellow writers by producing some of his most acclaimed novels in his 60s and 70s, including “The Human Stain” and “Sabbath’s Theater,” a savage narrative of lust and mortality he considered his finest work.

He identified himself as an American writer, not a Jewish one, but for Roth the American experience and the Jewish experience were often the same. While predecessors such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud wrote of the Jews’ painful adjustment from immigrant life, Roth’s characters represented the next generation. Their first language was English, and they spoke without accents. They observed no rituals and belonged to no synagogues. The American dream, or nightmare, was to become “a Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness.” The reality, more often, was to be regarded as a Jew among gentiles and a gentile among Jews.

In the novel “The Ghost Writer” he quoted one of his heroes, Franz Kafka: “We should only read those books that bite and sting us.” For his critics, his books were to be repelled like a swarm of bees.

Feminists, Jews and one ex- wife attacked him in print, and sometimes in person. Women in his books were at times little more than objects of desire and rage and The Village Voice once put his picture on its cover, condemning him as a misogynist. A panel moderator berated him for his comic portrayals of Jews, asking Roth if he would have written the same books in Nazi Germany. The Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem called “Portnoy’s Complaint” the “book for which all anti-Semites have been praying.” When Roth won the Man Booker International Prize, in 2011, a judge resigned, alleging that the author suffered from terminal solipsism and went “on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book.” In “Sabbath’s Theater,” Roth imagines the inscription for his title character’s headstone: “Sodomist, Abuser of Women, Destroyer of Morals.”

Ex-wife Claire Bloom wrote a best-selling memoir, “Leaving a Doll’s House,” in which the actress remembered reading the manuscript of his novel “Deception.” With horror, she discovered his characters included a boring middle-aged wife named Claire, married to an adulterous writer named Philip. Bloom also described her ex-husband as cold, manipulative and unstable. (Although, alas, she still loved him). The book was published by Virago Press, whose founder, Carmen Callil, was the same judge who quit years later from the Booker committee.

Roth’s wars also originated from within. He survived a burst appendix in the late 1960s and near-suicidal depression in 1987. After the disappointing reaction to his 1993 novel, “Operation Shylock,” he fell again into severe depression and for years rarely communicated with the media. For all the humor in his work — and, friends would say, in private life — jacket photos usually highlighted the author’s tense, dark-eyed glare. In 2012, he announced that he had stopped writing fiction and would instead dedicate himself to helping biographer Blake Bailey complete his life story. By 2015, he had retired from public life altogether.

He never promised to be his readers’ friend; writing was its own reward, the narration of “life, in all its shameless impurity.” Until his abrupt retirement, Roth was a dedicated, prolific author who often published a book a year and was generous to writers from other countries. For years, he edited the Writers from the Other Europe series, in which authors from Eastern Europe received exposure to American readers; Milan Kundera was among the beneficiaries. Roth also helped bring a wider readership to the acclaimed Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld.

Roth began his career in rebellion against the conformity of the 1950s and ended it in defense of the security of the 1940s; he was never warmer than when writing about his childhood, or more sorrowful, and enraged, than when narrating the shock of innocence lost. Hillel Italie, AP

Stephen King among the honorees at PEN America gala

Stephen King

On a night when speakers included Stephen King, Morgan Freeman and Margaret Atwood, no one at the PEN American gala had a more moving and inspiring presence than Parkland shooting survivor Samantha Fuentes.

One of three student gun control activists receiving PEN’s Freedom of Expression Courage Award, Fuentes became tearful, nauseous, fled the podium and returned a few minutes later to a standing ovation as she steadied herself and accepted an honor neither she nor Cameron Kasky nor Zion Kelly imagined or wanted.

“I think sometimes I forget I got shot,” she said, before speaking of her mission to “to prioritize people’s life over guns.”

“Thank you so much for believing in me, or not just me, thank you for believing that together we can correct the moral and fundamental problems in this country.”

The PEN gala, held yesterday [Macau time] at the American Museum of Natural History, was an education in the dangers and rewards of free expression, with words from longtime celebrities and those forced into fame, from political prisoners and those lucky enough to get out. The literary and human rights organization handed out prizes for literary service, political activism and defense of the First Amendment.

The gala took place as a longtime champion for writers oppressed in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, Philip Roth, was dying in a nearby hospital at age 85. Many that night spoke of risks to essential rights, abroad and in the U.S. Atwood, best known for her Dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” warned that “When democracy is in retreat the first thing authoritarians do is silence those who are telling stories they dislike.” She was presenting the Freedom to Write Award to two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, jailed in Myanmar.

In a letter read by Atwood, the journalists offered a dare to the Myanmar government: “Where is the truth? Where is the truth and justice?” they asked. “Where is democracy and freedom? Why do soldiers who are found guilty of murder get 10 years while we journalists who expose the murder face 14 years in prison?”

Freeman, who starred the film adaptation of King’s “Shawshank Redemption,” presented King his award for literary service and praised him as the “embodiment: of three essential qualities: “The writer as humanitarian, the writer as conduit to bringing unseen and unheard human experiences to life and the writer as activist to use the power of the pen to shape the world.”

King has a long history of supporting literacy and liberal causes and was remembered for a special act of courage and solidarity. When some bookstores in 1989 considered pulling Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” because of death threats resulting from the “fatwa” announced by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, King responded that he would withdraw his work in response.

In his acceptance speech, King called himself “just a guy who’s loved books since childhood,” but set a higher tone for the writer’s place in the world.

“Those who can read can learn to write and those who can do both will eventually succeed in the world,” he said.