Yes, Philip Roth’s works belong among the elite

IT’S fair to say that a certain number of eyebrows were skeptically arched when the Library of America announced plans to publish Philip Roth’s complete works.

At this point, no one can doubt Roth’s importance as a writer, but there are questions of magnitude and proportion. A certain amount of distasteful controversy attaches to his work -- allegations of prurience, Jewish self-loathing and, most frequently, misogyny. The Library of America, moreover, describes itself as helping “to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing.” It previously has singled out only two living authors -- Eudora Welty and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow -- as worthy of attention.

In other words, the question is: Does Roth, good writer though he may be, really rate this kind of attention in this sort of company?

Well, with the publication of this third in a projected series of eight volumes scheduled for completion in 2013 (when the author will turn 80), the answer clearly is yes. If eyebrows still are raised, it ought to be because eyes are wide with admiration.

The Library of America has done contemporary American letters a great service with this series, because we now see two things clearly that were not clear before: One is that Roth is America’s greatest living novelist; the other is that, taken in sequence, his fictions constitute a landmark in the history of literary modernism.

The conventional view always has situated Roth firmly among American authors or, more narrowly, among Jewish American writers. This series demonstrates that neither category is sufficient, or even wholly relevant. Roth’s onetime editor and longtime friend, the writer and critic David Rieff, was the first to point out that the author’s work needs to be understood in the 20th century progression of international literary modernism. Roth’s closest aesthetic compatriot, Rieff argues, is Samuel Beckett, whose singular focus, depth of exploration and utterly serious purpose Roth shares.

It is a daring formulation convincingly vindicated by this series. The modernist novel begins with James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which still slashes like a bright arrow across literary history and says, “Start here.” Joyce’s ambition was to represent in its totality a single, historically specific day in the history of a particular city, Dublin. By making it convenient to read Roth’s novels in sequence, what we now can see is that they constitute a similar though even more ambitious project: the representation of a single, specific life in its totality.

In that context, the three novels in this volume -- “The Great American Novel,” “My Life as a Man” and “The Professor of Desire” -- are the author’s account of pivotal middle age. The first of these is very possibly the funniest baseball novel ever written, the account of a vanished team in a forgotten league undone by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It’s a broad and wickedly shrewd exercise in slapstick narrated by an old sportswriter, Word Smith, and featuring such players as Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever actually attempted to literally “kill the umpire.” It’s a knowing satire on communal idealism and a sly send-up of Bernard Malamud’s American parable “The Natural.” It’s also Roth’s farewell to his wiseguy youth.

“My Life as a Man” and “The Professor of Desire” introduce the characters -- the doppelgangers Peter Tarnopol, Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh -- and preoccupations with identity and the erotic that will reappear and persist in his 16 subsequent novels. “My Life” is a tale of marriage as mutual torment in which Tarnopol is tricked into marrying the waitress he desires and experiences as his muse and as an afflicting spirit in both the emotional and writerly senses. At the time of publication, more than one critic compared the novel to August Strindberg’s writings. It’s tempting to draw the obvious correspondence with Roth’s own utterly disastrous first marriage, but the obvious impulse is, in this case, misleadingly reductionist.

As Roth said in a recent interview, “I can’t be idle and I don’t know what to do other than write.... I don’t really have other interests. My interest is in solving the problems presented by writing a book. That’s what stops my brain spinning like a car wheel in the snow, obsessing about nothing.... For me, the absolutely demanding mental test is the desire to get the work right. The crude cliche is that the writer is solving the problem of his life in his books. Not at all. What he’s doing is taking something that interests him in life and then solving the problem of the book -- which is, How do you write about this? The engagement is with the problem that the book raises, not with the problems you borrow from living. Those aren’t solved, they are forgotten in the gigantic problem of finding a way of writing about them.”

There’s probably never been a better description of the modernist method and its astringent ambitions. In “My Life as a Man” Roth also gives full vent to the bravura technical impulse, creating a savagely compelling novel within a novel.

“The Professor of Desire” follows the young university teacher and Kafka scholar Kepesh through a laceratingly inappropriate first marriage and into what ought to be a warmly satisfying relationship with a writer’s ideal partner in which he ought to find contentment but can’t.

At this juncture two fascinating aspects of Roth’s project emerge. One is the obvious contention -- through Tarnopol, Zuckerman and Kepesh -- that modern identity is inevitably fragmented. All three men are Roth and none is completely or sufficiently so. The other is that, for all these novels’ preoccupation with sex, there isn’t a drop of licentiousness to be found. We’re left to wonder why there isn’t a single sentence, no matter how explicit, that’s actually a turn-on. Czech novelist Milan Kundera said that “The Professor of Desire” made Roth “a great historian of modern eroticism.” That’s true, but it is a solitary eroticism too anxious to be passionate, too atomized to arouse.

It will be a fascinating experience to reread Roth’s later novels in the light of what the Library of America has shown us concerning his great project. As he recently said: “Who knew what getting old would be like? There may be a biological blinder about age that’s built in. You are not supposed to understand until you get there. Just as an animal doesn’t know about death, the human animal doesn’t know about age.”

And what of the controversies?

As Nathan Zuckerman/Philip Roth put it in “The Anatomy Lesson”: “Life and art are distinct.... What could be clearer? Yet the distinction is wholly elusive. That writing is an act of imagination seems to perplex and infuriate everyone.”

timothy.rutten@latimes.com