Remembering Roth: The Sharp Mustard Flavor of The Human Stain

Abstract

Philip Roth intrigued, provoked, amused, and absorbed his readers for more than fifty years. Challenging and delighting us, his novels have generated an intellectual response from writers and scholars that has created one of the most vibrant literary fields in modern literary criticism. Roth declared that he would write no more fiction after Nemesis, published in 2010. Now he is gone, and we can only await his official biography written by Blake Bailey and continue to speak amongst ourselves about his great literary legacy. Roth was an American to his core. His Jewish family and upbringing shaped his vision of a nation whose culture he never stopped exploring and whose flaws he dissected in ever more powerful ways. The nature of Roth’s contribution to his national culture is perhaps best expressed in Roth’s conversation with Primo Levi in 1986, when Roth asks Levi to explain “the tension between your rootedness and your impurity” as a Jew and an Italian. Levi returns: