Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity

By Ross Posnock

Book Overview

Has anyone ever worked harder and longer at being immature than Philip Roth? The novelist himself pointed out the paradox, saying that after establishing a reputation for maturity with two earnest novels, he "worked hard and long and diligently" to be frivolous--an effort that resulted in the notoriously immature Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Three-and-a-half decades and more than twenty books later, Roth is still at his serious "pursuit of the unserious." But his art of immaturity has itself matured, developing surprising links with two traditions of immaturity--an American one that includes Emerson, Melville, and Henry James, and a late twentieth-century Eastern European one that developed in reaction to totalitarianism. In Philip Roth's Rude Truth --one of the first major studies of Roth's career as a whole--Ross Posnock examines Roth's "mature immaturity" in all its depth and richness. Philip Roth's Rude Truth will force readers to reconsider the narrow categories into which Roth has often been slotted--laureate of Newark, New Jersey; junior partner in the firm Salinger, Bellow, Mailer, and Malamud; Jewish-American regionalist. In dramatic contrast to these caricatures, the Roth who emerges from Posnock's readable and intellectually vibrant study is a great cosmopolitan in the tradition of Henry James and Milan Kundera.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691116040
• ISBN13: 9780691116044
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

LITERARY CRITICISM

THE BOOK TAKES ONE DEEPER FROM THE EYES OF A KNOWLEDGEABLE MAN OF LETTERS. I LEARNED A LOT ABOUT PHILLIP ROTH, ESPECIALLY HIS LIFE-LONG EFFORT IN THE PORTRAYAL OF FLAWED HUMAN BEINGS, WHICH WE ALL ARE. I BUY ALL OF ROTH'S BOOKS- ENTERTAINING AND DEEP. BECAUSE OF THE TRUTH OF THE FAILED INDIVIDUAL, ESPECIALLY AFTER 1963 WHEN MY OWN WRITING SHOWS THE END OF JUDEOCHRISTIANITY, GOD IS BACK TO WORKING WITH THE US- GROUPS, COMMUNITIES,...

Terrific read on Roth and his Emersonian insouciance

This is the only study on Roth that centers on what Roth readers have found most entertaining in his work: his rudeness at the alter of bourgeois pieties. More striking, though, is Posnock's linking of Roth's rudeness to Emerson, a connection that is itself an instance of the audacity it is intended to clarify.

The Best and Best Written Criticism of Roth

As a committed devotee of Roth's work, I've read a number of articles and critiques of his literature and its meaning, but none compare to the expansiveness, clarity, and insight that one can derive from Posnock's book. While most works on Roth tend to focus on categorizing him narrowly as a Jewish American author, Posnock's work sees him in a novel light - Roth is part of a tradition of authors on both sides of the Atlantic...

Every day a new day to dawn. This Roth is but a morning star

Ross Posnock makes a new reading of the work of Philip Roth. He focuses on the idea of 'immaturity' and through it links Roth to literary traditions and writers to whom he is not normally connected. Perhaps most notably he connects Roth with the writers of the American Renaissance (1850-55) Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne the giants of the American Tradition. Posnock shows how Roth's refusal to accept the inhibiting...