He devoted a good portion of the opening of his last major novel, The Human Stain, to excoriating the “enormous piety binge” surrounding the Clinton impeachment. He has become a novelist whose every book is like a dispatch from the deepest recesses of the national mind. He has performed a hollowing-out of all the accoutrements the individual self gathers in this world-children (none), wives (divorced), parents (dead)-so that he could instead contain multitudes.

Yet Roth’s epic struggle with the Times is also his struggle with contemporaneity, and it is what makes him the most compelling of living writers.

“Famously rageful Roth is weirdly unenraged by the fascist takeover of America.” Sabbath did nothing for Israel.” And what, in all likelihood, awaits Roth in the Times when Death has finally had with him its inexorable way? An obituary from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. “Morris Sabbath, Puppeteer, 64, Dies.” After a lengthy, deadpan description of his crazy life, the final section lists his surviving relatives and then, out of nowhere, concludes, “Mr. In Sabbath’s Theater, Mickey Sabbath, contemplating suicide, composes his own obituary. She has hardly been better to Roth, however in 1995 she panned Sabbath’s Theater, his greatest novel.Īnd as it happens, for Roth in Connecticut, Death and the Times are inextricably linked. Lehmann-Haupt was eventually released from book reviewing and made into the Times’ head obituary writer, and Michiko Kakutani took over the most prominent daily reviewing spot at the paper. In the seventies, he did battle with its daily book critic, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, disdaining his intelligence, referring to “the ‘thoughts’ of a Lehmann-Haupt,” and even, at one point, publicly suggesting in all seriousness that the Times could easily replace him by holding a contest among qualified college seniors. Owned by proper German Jews and written by Philistines, the Times is the quintessence of everything he loathes. Roth gets the Times, and it drives him nuts.

That’s what’s happening up in Connecticut. How much longer can he keep this up? Every novel might be his last. He has managed to clear his life of everything that is not writing uninterrupted, he now spends hours and hours at work. In the Connecticut woods these days, there is Roth and there is Death: Death versus Roth Roth versus Death.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth