Philip Roth's Rude Truth The Art of Immaturity [Paperback]

Has anyone ever worked harder and longer at being immature than Philip Roth? The novelist himself pointed out the paradox, saying that after establishing a reputation for maturity with two earnest novels, he worked hard and long and diligently to be frivolous--an effort that resulted in the notoriously immaturePortnoy's Complaint(1969). Three-and-a-half decades and more than twenty books later, Roth is still at his serious pursuit of the unserious. But his art of immaturity has itself matured, developing surprising links with two traditions of immaturity--an American one that includes Emerson, Melville, and Henry James, and a late twentieth-century Eastern European one that developed in reaction to totalitarianism. InPhilip Roth's Rude Truth--one of the first major studies of Roth's career as a whole--Ross Posnock examines Roth's mature immaturity in all its depth and richness.

Philip Roth's Rude Truthwill force readers to reconsider the narrow categories into which Roth has often been slotted--laureate of Newark, New Jersey; junior partner in the firm Salinger, Bellow, Mailer, and Malamud; Jewish-American regionalist. In dramatic contrast to these caricatures, the Roth who emerges from Posnock's readable and intellectually vibrant study is a great cosmopolitan in the tradition of Henry James and Milan Kundera.

Ross Posnockis Professor of English at Columbia University, where he also teaches American Studies. His books includeThe Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity; Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual;andThe Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison. The present title offers a sophisticated, original vision and is a fine addition to the excellent body of critical material available on this significant prolific novelist. . . . Highly recommended. Crisply written, well argued and persuasive. Reading it, one looks forward to l3,