Beware White Male Rothians

Abstract

Beware White Male Rothians Jacques Berlinerblau (bio) I am not one to subscribe to crude sociological stereotypes. yet i can’t help but notice that a certain type of person intensely dislikes my recent book The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography (2021). Save one exception, that pattern has been evident from the peer-review process, through the pre-publication phase (see Zoller 2022; Sutter 2021), right on down to a trio of scathing reviews I will discuss forthwith. White male Rothians, it would seem, are impervious to the charms of my arguments. It is indeed better, as Gary Shteyngart once quipped, to be patronized than to be ignored. As a former book review editor for this very journal, I long ago learned that many fine monographs sit unreviewed because we couldn’t find scholars to assess them (more about that, anon). As such, I thank Professor Steven Kellman (The Forward), Professor Andy Connolly (Voegelin View), and Eric Vanderwall (Philip Roth Studies) for paying attention to this text. But fellas, respectfully, a book review is not a drive-by shooting! All professional scholars give and take their share of serrated criticism. To be an academician is to administer, and be subjected to, the learned snark of countless anonymous Reviewers Number Two. Even novelists, like Nathan Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), endured “the two-thousand-, three-thousand-, five-thousand-word lashing” that rankles for life (78). It’s probably best to suffer such indignities in silence—a truism borne out by Zuckerman’s ill-fated rant delivered to his bewildered tormentor, Milton Appel. In this case, however, I feel strongly—as battered authors are wont to do—that a rebuttal might be both timely and beneficial. Our world is falling down, so why not have a spirited, no-holds-barred conversation about race, sex, autobiography, pedagogy, and even scholarly mores as they pertain to book reviewing? After all, Philip Roth has passed away. His core audience is graying or dead. The market for serious literature, as the master grimly foretold, is dwindling. The humanities as a vocation teeter on the brink of extinction (Berlinerblau, “They’ve Been Scheming”). These troubled times offer scholars and lovers of fiction an opportunity to speak frankly. [End Page 82] If anything good emerges from this exchange, then it will be to arrive at a less sociologically crude definition of the White Male Rothian. ROTH AND RACE My analysis of Roth’s racial portraiture has not been warmly received. I approached my inquiry by collating every single depiction of African and African-American characters in his fiction from the 1952 “Box of Truths” to the 2010 Nemesis. This comprehensive analysis had not been performed before. I believe this is why researchers who had previously studied Roth and race drew conclusions different from my own. The patterns I discovered often surprised me. The patterns, to be frank, often troubled me. Roth’s portraits of his Black characters were frequently tasteless, bordering upon, and sometimes crossing into, racist literary depiction. When I discussed this discovery with scholars who study race, they recommended caution. Charges of racial insensitivity made against canonical figures, they advised, are either met with silence or a sort of bemused disregard. They thus counseled me to document my findings meticulously lest my first (and perhaps final) wave of reviewers claim my argument was flawed, insubstantial, non-existent, etc. I first shared my analysis of Roth’s treatment of race in a pre-publication excerpt that appeared in Salon magazine (Berlinerblau, “Philip Roth”). It was immediately rebuked by no less than Blake Bailey. In a now deleted tweet, he proclaimed my piece, if memory serves, the stupidest article he ever read about Roth. Steven Kellman—whose 1980 The Self-Begetting Novel is a work I greatly admire—was also not buying the analysis. He alleges that I quote “a few blatantly racist statements, but they are put into the mouths of bigots or else seem innocent.” Andy Connolly—whose Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition (2017) I reviewed rather positively on the pages of this journal (Berlinerblau, “Review”)—takes the criticism further. My calling attention to previously unnoted patterns of...