No hushed commemorations at cemeteries in Normandy for the survivors of these casualties, who likely died in the air or water. Often overshadowed by their more familiar European counterparts, the Pacific battles of World War II left behind thousands of families whose soldier sons and husbands were declared missing rather than dead. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being.” A “master of the rapturous list,” Roth can go too far, building fiction out of “a compendium of speeches, propositions, and diatribes.” Yet it’s from one of his least successful books that Pierpont mines this gem, “as close to a credo as Roth has ever written’’: “As an artist the nuance is your task. Pilloried by some Jewish voices after “Portnoy” and frequently labeled a misogynist for his treatment of his female characters (and, unfairly in Pierpont’s opinion, in the picture painted of him in his second wife’s memoir), Roth “courted the wrath of the rabbis, the Times critics, and the feminists.” A staff writer for The New Yorker and a friend of Roth’s, Pierpont brings admiration and affection to her assessment, while never relinquishing critical integrity. Pierpont describes a man “placidly uninterested in literary trends,” yet rarely placid about anything else. From early fame with “Goodbye, Columbus” and “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Roth’s work included some critically savaged experiments before a kind of renaissance with “American Pastoral,” “The Human Stain,” and “The Plot Against America.” These late novels earned him some of the best reviews of his life, but Pierpont says, “t is equally possible to favor some of the more unruly and ecstatic earlier books, as I do.” Prolific and provocative, Roth repeatedly wrestled with ideas of Jewish identity, American politics, psychoanalysis, history, and sex. As Claudia Roth Pierpont (no relation) points out, the author still pens essays and letters, writing constantly he “can’t stop turning life into words.” And although this isn’t a typical no-stone-unturned biography - some girlfriends are barely mentioned - in chronicling and examining Roth’s fictional oeuvre Pierpont brilliantly captures much of Roth’s life in her words. Philip Roth, who last year announced his retirement from writing novels, isn’t completely finished.
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