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Roth and Celebrity ed. by Aimee Pozorski, and: Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth by Claudia Franziska Brühwiler

2014; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pan.2014.0025

1565-3668

David Hadar,

American Jewish Fiction Analysis

Reviewed by: Roth and Celebrity ed. by Aimee Pozorski, and: Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth by Claudia Franziska Brühwiler David Hadar Aimee Pozorski (ed.), Roth and Celebrity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. x +191 pp. Claudia Franziska Brühwiler, Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. xv + 174 pp. Recent years have seen a flow of criticism on the work of the American novelist Philip Roth. Each year two issues of Philip Roth Studies, numerous papers in other journals, book sections, as well as monographs and essay collections are devoted to his work. All the while, Roth himself is the most influential critic of his own novels, as has been noted as early as 1979 by John Leonard in The New York Review of Books and since then by others. Statements about reading and [End Page 404] writing made in his novels, essays, and interviews remain the central reference points for academic studies of Roth and his work as well as more exoteric publications such as Claudia Roth Pierpont’s (no relation) much publicized Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books (2013). One of the challenges for Roth critics is to try and escape, at least to some extent, Roth’s influence and read him through eyes other than his own. Claudia Franziska Brühwiler does so through working with concepts form political science and anthropology, disciplines Roth has not made his own, whereas the collection of essays Roth and Celebrity places an issue that Roth seems to be conflicted about at the center of the discussion of his work and public image. Roth and Celebrity is a joint effort by both established and beginning scholars to make a relatively modest claim and then to complicate and nuance it. Adroitly edited and introduced by Aimee Pozorski, author of Roth and Trauma and President of the Roth Society, it argues that a reading of Roth is “incomplete without considering the distorting influence of celebrity in America” (5). This point is then established irrefutably, though the book is anything but monolithic and some essays relegate celebrity to a relatively minor place. Some of the essays deal with celebrity only tangentially but in a way that works to emphasize its importance for Roth’s oeuvre. Brett Kaplan, for instance, shows how celebrity is entangled with Roth’s well-canvassed motifs, such as the double, creating a “literalization” of “the troubled underside behind the mask of the American dream” (148). Nigel Rodenhurst goes a step further and writes that much of Roth’s aversion to publicity can be understood not in terms of celebrity studies, but as part of a Jewish history of “dis/simulation” (155). Most of the chapters are more directly about fame and infamy, making larger or smaller contributions to the research of literary celebrity, but, though drawing on theorists of celebrity, they often miss the chance of showing how the case of Roth can shed light on other writers (or other “stars,” for that matter). Maggie McKinley’s excellent reading of Sabbath’s Theater (1995) as conflating celebrity with transgression is an example of how the volume does not move beyond Roth. Whereas transgression has been an important part of American celebrity culture, from Jesse James to Lady Gaga, McKinley chooses (perhaps wisely) not to place her discussion of Roth’s novel in this context. James D. Bloom’s article explores the dependence of Roth’s characters on Hollywood movies and their stars for the construction of their self-image and values; while Ira Nadel devotes his piece to the failure of adaptations of Roth’s novels to the screen, saving most of us the trouble of watching these unsuccessful movies. Through a minute account of Roth’s appearances in print and web over a three year period, Derek Parker Royal shows how celebrity is only partially controllable by Roth. Debra Shostak focuses on loss of subjectivity and a sense of reality due to celebrity status, returning to some of the themes she explored in her illuminating study Philip Roth — Countertexts, Counterlives (2004). Mark Shechner’s short and witty chapter, closing the volume, brings into [End Page 405] relief the paradox...