The Early Fiction of Philip Roth (review)

Balbir Singh. The Early Fiction of Philip Roth. New Delhi: Omega Publications, 2009. cloth. 154 pp. INR 400.Philip Roth's six-decade long stellar literary career exuberantly unfolds a great variety of themes, techniques, and narrative styles. His debut work of fiction, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959), was hailed as inaugurating a new sensibility in Amet ican lerters by leading writers and critics of day. Saul Bellow, for instance, reviewing book for Commentary noted, Goodbye, Columbus is a first book but it is not book of a beginnet. Unlike those of us who came howling into world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, and teeth, speaking coherently. At twenty-six he is skillful, witty, and energetic and performs like a virtuoso (77). Significantly, Roth's early fiction often trenchantly probes American Jewish milieu and raises searching questions about its socio-religious mores, even if such novelistic critique is always mediated through power of comedy. Characterizing Roth's stance as anti-Semitic, no less a critic than Irving Howe, faulted novelist for employing his talent in the setvice of a creative vision deeply marred by vulgarity (86-87). Of course, Roth himself would locate both his penchant for ethical striving and his preoccupation with sexuality to his complex Jewish-American cultural upbringing (Great American 67). Patadoxically, Roth's vague sense of estrangement from both his Jewish cultural past and his American social life triggers dynamic of his fictional vision.Admittedly a doctoral dissertation turned into a monograph, Balbir Singh's The Early Fiction of Philip Roth seeks to read select texts, namely, Columbus (1959), Letting Go (1962), When She Was Good (1967), Portnoy's CompUint (1969) and The Professor of Desire (1977) from early phase of novelist's career in light of ethical concerns these powetfully embody. Divided into seven chapters with a fairly exhaustive bibliography, The Early Fiction of Philip Roth clearly foregrounds in its introduction stereotype-refuting belief that Roth is neithet a self-hating Jew not overtly ethnic nor misogynistic as critics often make him out to be and that his moral preoccupations evolve naturally out of his engagement with family and society.Singh's monograph, product of a holistic reading, is no less important than more contemporary readings informed by critical paradigms on Roth's oeuvre. While I have no quarrels with author's reading per se, I must also admit that I felt let down by his selective reading of Roth's early novels as well as by his lack of critical rigor. Since Singh uncritically buys into position that Roth's eatly fiction is largely unmediated realism, his atgument fails to register that two of novels which he includes for analysis, namely, Portnoy's Compkint and The Professor of Desire, with their self-reflexive irony, tug at moorings of social realism. It is also intriguing that authot treats only cursorily Roth's novels Our Gang(\97\), The Breast (1972, revised 1980), The Great American Novel (1973), and My Life as a Man (1974), and invariably for purposes of contextualizing his argument. Since these novels unmistakably attest to Roth's metafictional vision, Singh's omissions have, perhaps, robbed his work of a certain force and vitality that would have otherwise accrued to its credit. No wonder such unexamined fictional exclusions and abortive critical positions it inspires run like a fault line through terrain of this monograph.While Singh's critical understanding of various concerns in Roth's fiction is unquestionably sound, it is also glaringly evident that he does not adequately engage with its chatacteristic irony and humor that is meant to complicate and deconstruct a conventional undetstanding of moral and ethical values. Given that Roth's protagonists are torn between ttaditional ethics and new narcissistic desires for personal freedom (Bradbury qtd. …