June 20, 2008
Read this before reviewing Roth’s new novel
Philip Roth‘s new novel, Indignation, will not appear in stores until this fall. But advance copies of the book went out to critics in April and this fact has Harper’s Magazine contributing editor Wyatt Mason thinking about how it will be reviewed.
He’s not wondering if the reviews will be positive or negative. Mason says he’s curious to see how much of Roth’s prior work his fellow critics will have read before passing judgment on the newest novel. Here’s more:
Roth’s productivity, with its now-annual alarms, begs that a critic ask a few cumbersome questions that apply when approaching the work of any number of contemporary authors. Oates, Updike, Munro, Marías, Kundera, Coetzee, McEwan, T. C. Boyle, Amis, Pynchon, DeLillo, Rushdie: when reviewing the work of such generative authors, how familiar should the critic be with such writers’ earlier output? Should one have read, when sitting down to review Saturday or The Empress of Florence or My Sister, My Love, their writers’ other books? If not, why? If so, how many?
Mason goes on to say that the reviews will likely vary according to the critic’s prior knowledge of Roth. For example, those who’ve only read Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint would have a totally different perspective of Roth from those who’ve only read The Counterlife and Operation Shylock.
That said, Roth has written a lot of books in the last 50-something years. So, it might be hard for someone to get caught up on Roth’s career between now and this fall. Mason, in his essay, acknowledges that fact but he seems to indicate that a critic should at least make an attempt to become familiar with a writer’s “engagement with the form”:
Much as the historian assigned to review, say, Saul Friedlander’s two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews would be expected to have read a library of similar studies to be deemed a reliable arbiter, a critic assigned a novel by an established writer should bring to bear not merely a knowledge of The Novel but a knowledge of that particular writer’s engagement with the form. And although Roth and the writers listed above, owing to decades of industry, have made a broad knowledge of their work impractical to acquire, such knowledge, precisely because of its increasing rarity, becomes, for a critic, that much more essential to possess.
It is not that knowledge of this kind indemnifies the critic against shortsightedness; rather, it protects him against worse sins: apathy and ignorance.
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