NOAH FELDMAN: Philip Roth refused to sit in judgement of his characters. Critics hated this
'It’s not that they would deny the right of writers to express their inner lives; it’s rather that they would like such revelations to be tempered by judgment'
It’s hard to think of a contemporary writer who inspires more intense disagreement than Philip Roth, who died Tuesday at 85. From the surface, the debate seems to be about feminism: Observers have long noted that Roth’s female characters are less than fully realized, while his male characters often express misogynistic attitudes. But the disagreement, I think, goes deeper — to the question of what social function literature should fulfill. To Roth’s admirers, the point of literature is to expose depths of human experience that would otherwise be hidden or repressed. Roth certainly excelled in reporting on the vicissitude of desire, especially the male and the Jewish one. This is, after all, the man who famously described “the perfect couple: she puts the id back in Yid; I put the oy back in goy.” To his supporters, a part of Roth’s genius, going beyond his eternal search for the mot juste, is his taboo-breaking willingness to show what lust and shame look like stripped of piety or, ...
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