Except for a detail or two, I agree with everything Irving Howe (p. 69) says about Philip Roth, but I wonder whether the steady growth in Roth’s reputation over the past ten years or so is really a function of the decline in the quality of his work. I have no quarrel with Mr. Howe’s view that Roth has come to stand very close to the center of our culture; and although I would rate Portnoy’s Complaint a bit more highly than Mr. Howe does (perhaps because I have not, as he puts it, committed the cruelty of reading it twice), I have no doubt that the general direction Roth has traveled as an artist from Goodbye, Columbus in 1959 to The Breast in 1972 is down. What I would question, however, is Mr. Howe’s delicately phrased suggestion that Roth has become so central a figure on the contemporary scene because his work has deteriorated, as though his career were a case of a serious or difficult writer accommodating himself to the tastes of a mass public and achieving popularity in return. The process, I think, has worked in almost exactly the opposite way. Roth is now central not because he has “sold out”—to use the nostalgic term which, I suspect, was at the back of Mr. Howe’s mind in considering this particular question—but because in the course of his literary career more and more people have come along who are exactly in tune with the sense of things he has always expressed in his work and who have accordingly and in increasing numbers come to recognize him as their own.

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Roth, as Mr. Howe demonstrates, is a tendentious writer who is always bent on making a point; to which one might add that the point he is bent on making is almost always the same, and has been from the beginning. It is, quite simply, that Americans are disgusting people. Since the Americans Roth writes about are more often than not Jewish, some of his critics have charged him with a special animus against Jews. A case can certainly be made in support of this charge, but I think it is also clear from Letting Go and even clearer from When She Was Good, not to mention Our Gang, that Roth’s opinion of non-Jewish Americans, and especially small-town Wasps unredeemed by patrician blood, is scarcely higher than his opinion of American Jews. They are all disgusting to him—the Bassarts no less than the Patimkins, a Lucy Nelson no less than a Sophie Portnoy—and his work is mainly devoted to exploring that disgust.

Sometimes, as in parts of Goodbye, Columbus and in scattered passages of Portnoy’s Complaint, he grinds the faces of his characters with zest and exuberance; sometimes, as in Letting Go and When She Was Good, he becomes as dreary and tiresome himself as he makes his characters appear. But whether lively or dull, Roth’s stories and novels never vary in one significant respect; they never achieve surprise. For their overriding purpose is not to question the standard ideas and attitudes which his readers, as members of the educated class, can with complete confidence be expected to entertain about Americans of every other kind; their purpose is, rather, to reinforce those ideas and attitudes, to offer as it were documentary evidence for the complacent thesis that the country is inhabited exclusively by vulgarians, materialists, boors, and bores. Except, that is, for “us”: the author and his readers who join together in celebration of their vast superiority to everyone else around them—although in what, precisely, this alleged superiority consists is very difficult to tell. For what Baruch Hochman, in a passage quoted by Mr. Howe, says of the narrator of Goodbye, Columbus—that “It is not at all clear how Neil Klugman, who is so offended at the Patimkins, stands for anything substantially different from what they stand for”—is true of all of Roth’s protagonists and of his authorial point of view in general.

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A remarkably similar species of snobbery and self-righteousness is, of course, one of the distinctive marks of those members of the professional and technical intelligentsia in America who make up what has come to be known as the New Class. And indeed, there is an intriguing parallel between the ethos of the New Class and the attitudes embodied in the work of Philip Roth. The New Class sees itself, in the words of one of its member-admirers, as a “conscience constituency” motivated only by ideas and ideals, whereas others are driven only by baser impulses and issues “of the stomach.” Just so, the authorial point of view in the work of Philip Roth claims for itself a singular sensitivity to things of the spirit (even when, as in the case of Alexander Portnoy’s yearning for liberation from all conditions and limits, this sensitivity comes disguised as sexual lust), whereas others are represented as altogether blind to things of the spirit and as caring only for lesser things of the flesh like food and money and material possessions. Or again, although the New Class—as Penn Kemble and Josh Muravchik (p. 78) show in careful and elaborate detail—is capable of supreme ruthlessness in its pursuit of power, it has consistently given its own ambitions, not only for power but for status and wealth as well, the benefit of every conceivable doubt while excoriating or making fun of the needs and wishes of others and putting them always in the most highly unfavorable light. Just so, Roth is forever exempting his protagonists—and, by sympathetic extension, himself and his readers—from the ridicule to which, most often through the device of malicious caricature, everyone else is relentlessly subjected in his work.

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Mr. Howe, who I believe has a much better opinion of the spiritual and moral character of the New Class than I have, would probably object to this line of argument. Nevertheless, it does not strike me as fanciful to suggest that Philip Roth owes his centrality to the fact that he so perfectly embodies the ethos of a group which began coming to consciousness of itself as a distinctive social class around the time Roth first appeared on the scene and which has become numerous enough and powerful enough in recent years to move from the margins of our culture into the very mainstream of our political life. The New Class, in short, now constitutes a mass audience in its own right and Roth is the New-Class writer par excellence. No wonder he is such a success.

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