Editing Philip Roth (section)

==Influences and themes==
Much of Roth's fiction revolves around semi-autobiographical themes, while self-consciously and playfully addressing the perils of establishing connections between Roth and his fictional lives and voices.<ref name = "Berlinerblau">{{Cite news|issn=0009-5982|last=Berlinerblau|first=Jacques|title=Do We Know Philip Roth?|work=The Chronicle of Higher Education|access-date=April 7, 2014|date=April 7, 2014|url=http://chronicle.com/article/Do-We-Know-Philip-Roth-/145671/}}</ref> Examples of this close relationship between the author's life and his characters' include narrators and protagonists such as David Kepesh and [[Nathan Zuckerman]] as well as the character "Philip Roth", who appears in ''[[The Plot Against America]]'' and of whom there are two in ''[[Operation Shylock]]''. Critic Jacques Berlinerblau noted in ''[[The Chronicle of Higher Education]]'' that these fictional voices create a complex and tricky experience for readers, deceiving them into believing they "know" Roth.<ref name = "Berlinerblau"/>

In Roth's fiction the question of authorship is intertwined with the theme of the idealistic, secular Jewish son who attempts to distance himself from Jewish customs and traditions, and from what he perceives as the sometimes suffocating influence of parents, rabbis, and other community leaders.<ref name ="GreenbergP11" /> Roth's fiction has been described by critics as pervaded by "a kind of alienation that is enlivened and exacerbated by what binds it".<ref name="GreenbergP11">Greenberg, Robert M. (Winter 1997) [https://web.archive.org/web/20150904132552/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_n4_v43/ai_20614549/pg_11/ "Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth".] ''Twentieth Century Literature''. Archived March 20, 2008.</ref>

Roth's first work, ''[[Goodbye, Columbus]]'', was an irreverently humorous depiction of the life of middle-class Jewish Americans and received highly polarized reviews;<ref name="Brauner"/> one reviewer found it infused with self-loathing. In response, Roth, in his 1963 essay "Writing About Jews" (collected in ''Reading Myself and Others''), maintained that he wanted to explore the conflict between the call to Jewish solidarity and his desire to be free to question the values and morals of middle-class Jewish Americans uncertain of their identities in an era of cultural assimilation and upward social mobility:<ref>{{cite journal |last=Roth |first=Philip |date=December 1963 |title=Writing About Jews |journal=[[Commentary (magazine)|Commentary]]}}</ref>
<blockquote>The cry 'Watch out for the goyim!' at times seems more the expression of an unconscious wish than of a warning: Oh that they were out there, so that we could be together here! A rumor of persecution, a taste of exile, might even bring with it the old world of feelings and habits—something to replace the new world of social accessibility and moral indifference, the world which tempts all our promiscuous instincts, and where one cannot always figure out what a Jew is that a Christian is not.</blockquote>

In Roth's fiction the exploration of "promiscuous instincts" within the context of Jewish lives, mainly from a male viewpoint, plays an important role. In the words of critic [[Hermione Lee]]:<ref name="Lee">Lee, Hermione (1982). ''Philip Roth''. New York: Methuen & Co.</ref>
<blockquote>Philip Roth's fiction strains to shed the burden of Jewish traditions and proscriptions. ... The liberated Jewish consciousness, let loose into the disintegration of the American Dream, finds itself deracinated and homeless. American society and politics, by the late sixties, are a grotesque travesty of what Jewish immigrants had traveled towards: liberty, peace, security, a decent liberal democracy.</blockquote>

While Roth's fiction has strong autobiographical influences, it also incorporates social commentary and political satire, most obviously in ''[[Our Gang (novel)|Our Gang]]'' and ''[[Operation Shylock]]''. From the 1990s on, Roth's fiction often combined autobiographical elements with retrospective dramatizations of postwar American life. Roth described ''[[American Pastoral]]'' and the two following novels as a loosely connected "American trilogy". Each of these novels treats aspects of the postwar era against the backdrop of the nostalgically remembered Jewish American childhood of Nathan Zuckerman, in which the experience of life on [[United States home front during World War II|the American home front during the Second World War]] features prominently.{{Citation needed|date=October 2009}} ''American Pastoral'' looks at the legacy of the 1960s, as Swede Levov's daughter becomes an antiwar terrorist. ''[[I Married a Communist]]'' (1998), in which radio actor Ira Ringold is revealed as a communist sympathizer, is set in the [[McCarthyism|McCarthy]] era''. [[The Human Stain]]'', in which classics professor Coleman Silk's secret history is revealed, explores [[identity politics]] in the late 1990s.

In much of Roth's fiction, the 1940s, comprising Roth's and Zuckerman's childhood, mark a high point of American idealism and social cohesion. A more satirical treatment of the patriotism and idealism of the war years is evident in Roth's comic novels, such as ''[[Portnoy's Complaint]]'' and ''[[Sabbath's Theater]]''. In ''[[The Plot Against America]]'', the [[alternate history]] of the war years dramatizes the prevalence of [[anti-Semitism]] and racism in America at the time, despite the promotion of increasingly influential anti-racist ideals during the war. In his fiction, Roth portrayed the 1940s, and the [[New Deal]] era of the 1930s that preceded it, as a heroic phase in American history. A sense of frustration with social and political developments in the United States since the 1940s is palpable in the American trilogy and ''[[Exit Ghost]]'', but had already been present in Roth's earlier works that contained political and social satire, such as ''[[Our Gang (novel)|Our Gang]]'' and ''[[The Great American Novel (Roth)|The Great American Novel]]''. Writing about the latter, Hermione Lee points to the sense of disillusionment with "the American Dream" in Roth's fiction: "The mythic words on which Roth's generation was brought up—winning, patriotism, gamesmanship—are desanctified; greed, fear, racism, and political ambition are disclosed as the motive forces behind the 'all-American ideals'."<ref name="Lee" /> Although Roth's writings often explored the Jewish experience in America, Roth rejected being labeled a [[American Jews|Jewish American]] writer. "It's not a question that interests me. I know exactly what it means to be Jewish and it's really not interesting," he told the [[The Guardian|''Guardian'' newspaper]] in 2005. "I'm an American."<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-philiproth/pulitzer-winning-author-philip-roth-dies-at-85-says-agent-idUSKCN1IO0CM|title=Pulitzer-winning author Philip Roth dies at 85, says agent|work=Reuters|date=May 23, 2018|access-date=May 26, 2018|language=en-US}}</ref>

Roth was a [[baseball]] fan, and credited the game with shaping his literary sensibility. In an essay published in ''[[The New York Times]]'' on [[Opening Day]], 1973, Roth wrote that "baseball, with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategy, its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its 'characters,' its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its mythic transformation of the immediate, was the literature of my boyhood... Of course, as time passed neither the flavor and suggestiveness of [[Red Barber]]'s narration, nor specific details, vivid and revealing even as [[Rex Barney]]'s pre-game hot dog, could continue to satisfy a developing literary appetite; there is no doubt, however, that they helped sustain me until I was old enough and literate enough to begin to respond to the great inventors of narrative detail and masters of narrative voice and perspective, like [[Henry James|James]] and [[Joseph Conrad|Conrad]] and [[Dostoyevsky]] and [[Saul Bellow|Bellow]]."<ref>{{Cite news |last=Roth |first=Philip |date=April 2, 1973 |title=My Baseball Years |work=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/02/archives/my-baseball-years.html}}</ref> Baseball features in several of Roth's novels; the hero of ''[[Portnoy's Complaint]]'' dreams of playing like [[Duke Snider]], and [[Nicholas Dawidoff]] called ''[[The Great American Novel (Roth novel)|The Great American Novel]]'' "one of the most eccentric baseball novels ever written".<ref>{{Cite book |title=Baseball: A Literary Anthology |publisher=[[Library of America]] |year=2002 |editor-last=Dawidoff |editor-first=Nicholas |pages=386}}</ref> ''[[American Pastoral]]'' alludes to [[John R. Tunis]]'s baseball novel ''The Kid from Tomkinsville''.

In a speech on his 80th birthday, Roth emphasized the importance of realistic detail in American literature:<blockquote>the passion for specificity, the hypnotic materiality of the world one is in, is all but at the heart of the task to which every American novelist has been enjoined since [[Herman Melville]] and his whale and [[Mark Twain]] and his river: to discover the most arresting, evocative verbal depiction of every last American thing. Without strong representation of the thing—animate or inanimate—without the crucial representation of what is real, there is nothing. Its concreteness, its unabashed focus on all the particulars, a fervor for the singular and a profound aversion to generalities is fiction's lifeblood. It is from a scrupulous fidelity to the blizzard of specific data that is a personal life, it is from the force of its uncompromising particularity, from its physicalness, that the realistic novel, the insatiable realistic novel with its multitude of realities, derives its ruthless intimacy. And its mission: to portray humanity in its particularity.<ref>{{Cite book |title=Philip Roth at 80:A Celebration |publisher=[[Library of America]] |year=2014 |pages=54}}</ref></blockquote>