Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition

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Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition offers a fresh reading of the later career development of one of Americas most celebrated authors. Through a contextual analysis of a select number of texts, this innovative study discusses how famed novels such as American Pastoral and The Plot against America demonstrate Philip Roths considerable interest in mapping, by means of his unique literary talent, the changing shape and fortunes of American liberalism since the 1930s. By viewing these novels and other seminal works of his later period through a wider historical lens, this book informs readers of the myriad ways in which Roths major phase of writing since the mid-1990s has shown considerable concern with questions of class, ethnicity, race, gender, and literary culture, all of which have been key components in the shifting intellectual and political makeup of American liberal ideology from the New Deal to our present time. This book goes beyond a mere historical analysis by taking a new look at how Roths experimentations in narrative style and his appeal to ahistorical notions of literary tradition rest in complex alignment with his fictional treatment of aspects of American history. This novel work of criticism demonstrates a heightened awareness of Roths career-length fascination with the formal characteristics of fiction, making clear to its audience that any reductively linear reading of Roth as a political novelist should be avoided at all costs. Ultimately, Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition offers a stimulatingly intelligent approach to the art of one of Americas true literary titans, providing the focused reader with a nuanced understanding of how Roths fiction has been shaped by the various competing strains in his dual roles as a disinterested formalist aesthete, on the one hand, and as a politically engaged author on the other.

Reviews

Students of Philip Roths writings will value this full-length study by Connolly (Hostos Community College, CUNY) along with A Political Companion to Philip Roth, ed. by Claudia Franziska Brhwiler and Lee Trepanier (CH, Jan'18, 55-1662), in which Connolly has an essay on Roths novel The Human Stain. (That essay focuses on the American "underclass"; in the present volume, the chapter devoted to The Human Stain focuses on race and ethnicity). Here Connolly concentrates on five Roth novels, departing from while acknowledging the formalist preoccupations by New Criticism interpreters. Indeed, the oscillations of Roths character Zuckerman across the novels reveals Roths tensionstensions over aesthetic responsibility to the imagination and social engagementanticipating and accompanying the cultural wars of post-1960s social movements and the anxieties tempering Roths Jewish consciousness. The egalitarianism Roths father hoped would result from the New Deal heavily influenced his author son, and Connolly examines the impact on Roth and his critics of Lionel Trilling, Arthur Schlesinger, LBJs Great Society programs, and the reactions of neoconservatives to the world Zuckerman inhabits. This sound critique is prodigiously referenced. . . . Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * CHOICE *
Connolly is a brilliant guide through the many. . . aspects of Roths later fiction that make him such a compelling author, particularly to those interested in American politics and history. That specific readership will find in Connollys book a captivating analysis of the complex relationship between Roths artistic, political, and historical viewpoints, forcing the reader to reconsider his or her way of engaging with the worlds of Zuckerman. * VoegelinView *
Andy Connolly breaks new ground in Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition by taking Roths fiction wholly back into the world of American political culture from which his art comes, from the New Deal to the current fractured political scene. In fresh, perceptive, and deeply informed close readings of the later novels, Connolly challenges the ways we have thought about Philip Roth. His superb scholarship shows persuasively how the decline of the liberal consensus concerning American society inflects Roths often conflicted engagement with matters of historical fact, the place of the artist, and the forms of fiction. -- Debra Shostak, College of Wooster
Connollys ambitious study considers the uneasy relationship between Roths formal experimentation and his historical consciousness. Via the perspectives of literary formalism and new historicism, Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition raises new questions about the vexed status of Roths literary techniqueas exemplified by his use of narrative subjectivityin conversation with his representation of American history and politics. Organized according to major historical episodes in the U.S. from 1930 to 2004, the book covers significant ground in revealing what political and historical forcesforces reflected through Roths masterful use of narrative uncertaintyhave contributed to a sense of American identity. With a special focus on the Zuckerman novels and The Plot Against America, this book is a meaningful contribution to Roth studies in its rigor, relevance, and grace. -- Aimee Pozorski, Central Connecticut State University
In Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition,Andy Connolly offers a highly insightful reading of Roth later novels. This book makes a vital contribution to Roth Studies, as itsmartlyilluminates how Roth's work engages the central political questions that shaped liberalism in the post-1945 era. Over the course of this study,Connolly constructs a compelling portrait of Roth's political thought; the book offers smart readings of some of Roth's most important novels (American Pastoral, The Plot Against America)while also presenting a thoughtful history of American liberalism in the second half of the twentieth century.An important book for not only Roth scholars, but also anyone interested in the development of liberal thought over the past sixty years. -- Matthew Shipe, Washington University, St. Louis
Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition. Andy Connolly. Lexington Books, 2017. Since January 2017, some of us may have felt the urge to revisit, either in our minds or physically, the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to convince [ourselves] that nothing had changed other than that Donald J. Trump is now in office (Roth, 2004, 5). And we may still have felt just like Philip Roths homonymous narrator in The Plot Against America (2004): afraid. Andy Connollys Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition does not include any references to the current state of American politics, yet the present echoes audibly and reminds the reader how insightful an observer of American politics, culture, and history we find in Philip Roth. At the same time, though, Connolly warns us against the kind of exploitative readings that reduce Roths work to the contexts he works with, disregarding art and the authors formalist viewpoint. Instead, Connolly outlines how, as a result of Roths deeply ambiguous relationship to principled notions concerning the autonomy of the literary text from extending issues of context, the historical is something that simultaneously recedes from and returns to view in his writing (Connolly, 2017, 2). Said ambiguity is hard to navigate for readers drawn to contextualist readings, particularly in Roths later novels, namely in the so-called American trilogy narrated by his writer-protagonist Nathan Zuckerman, in the latters final appearance in Exit Ghost (2007), and in The Plot. Connolly dedicates a chapter to each of these novels, linking them with the history of American liberalism, while he simultaneously shows us that Roth, the writer, is neither a chronicler nor a mere political thinker: The blurring of the boundaries between reality and fiction in Roths work involves a certain inter-penetration of the authors private imaginationrebellious and defiant though it iswith the outer landscape that is constituted by larger historical phenomena, Connolly explains (2017, 58). The more the writer tries to reinvent life as fiction, the more the tidal wave of history complicates his task. After (re-)acquainting the reader with Rothsthus many claimalter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, and the authors continued, increasing contention with history as a place of great uncertainty in which causality and meaning are highly difficult to determine (Connolly, 2017, 17), Connolly turns in chapter 2 to the second part of the American trilogy, I Married A Communist (1998). Instead of following the path of many a discussion of the novel in the context of the McCarthy 1/3 era, Connolly illuminates the character of Murray Ringold as a fictionalization of Lionel Trilling and how he embodies the boundaries of the impassioned voice of reason. In an engaging reading of the character and his intellectual counterpart, Connolly also addresses the parallels between Trilling and Roth, their shared understanding of the deceptions that are at play in the relationship between peoples committed faith in moral absolutes and ideological purities, on the one hand, and the disorderly state of their individual lives on the other (Connolly, 2017, 100). Yet as Connolly convincingly demonstrates throughout the book, Roth questions whether any of us can claim objectivity and sobriety when faced with the tumults of lifeand if those who do, may not simply be deceiving themselves. Betrayals and deceptions are a recurring motif in Roths writing; the alleged national selfdeception of the liberal post-war consensus becomes central to American Pastoral (1997) and thus to chapter 3 of Connollys treatise. He lays out how the idylls of one of the central characters, Swede Levovs view of a factory as a home to the thriving, non-alienated labor of vigorous male workers reflects a distinctly exaggerated version of post-war assumptions about the classless structure of American society (Connolly, 2017, 139). In particular, Connolly exposes the racial and gender conflicts that, in a superficial reading, remain hidden behind the pastoral faade that gets shaken by the turmoil of 1960s politics. Roths unreliable narrator, Zuckerman, fools his reader into momentarily believing Roth to be an equally nostalgic soul as the Swede while, all along, he has been playing again with the uncertainty of reality. In chapter 4, Connolly turns to The Human Stain (2000) and thus enters the culture wars on American campuses, a nexus which is further complicated by issues of race and class. In a compelling analysis, Connolly combines an informed view of the rise of identity politics with the plight of the central character, an African American professor of classics who passes as white and, ironically, comes under attack due to allegations of racism. Even more interesting than the discussion of racial politics, Connolly zooms in on socially disadvantaged characters, considering their struggles in light of the presidency of Bill Clinton and his economic policy that stood in stark contrast to post-war liberal ideas. Connollys discussion of Exit Ghost in chapter 5 renders it impossible for the reader (at least for this one) to shake off thoughts of the present. Earlier, Connolly delineates how liberalism lost its claim on a unifying national narrative to the Republican Party and the conservative movement. As a consequence, the GOP became an obvious choice for a majority of voters in 2000, 2004, and 2016. Considering the turn in voter appeal, Connolly dissects the scenes between Zuckerman and a young couple, both aspiring writers, who watch in disbelief the election results of 2004. Connolly may warn against such simplistic parallels, Roth himself may despair faced with them, but the present-day reader can hardly resist to echo Zu

Author Bio

Andy Connolly teaches in the English Department at Hostos Community College, CUNY.