The New Neo

Author Philip Roth died last Tuesday. You can read hundreds of tributes to him and many criticisms of him, and I don’t have too much to add to that except to say that I liked his early works (including two that almost no one seems to care much for, Letting Go and When She Was Good) but I stopped reading him long, long ago because his works ceased to interest me, for whatever reason.

But in reading about him the other day I came across this interview of Roth by NPR’s Terry Gross, and it reminded me of something. Here’s the quote, which describes how he prepared his parents for the furor that would undoubtedly ensue when Portnoy’s Complaint came out:

Well, my mother and father were pretty good. I have to tell you, I had to prepare them. I felt I had to prepare them for the publication of this book. That was not something I had done with the previous three books. But before “Portnoy’s Complaint,” I did have to prepare them, I thought, because it became clear as publication came upon us that it was going to be a big book. I didn’t know that for a while, but then I knew it from my publisher, Random House. And I wrote books that they were publishing and so on.

And so I was living in New York City at the time, and I invited them over to have lunch with me. I invited my mother and father to come over from Elizabeth, N.J., where they lived to have lunch with me. And it wasn’t the first time they had come over and had lunch, but this was special. I said I wanted to talk to them about something. And we had lunch. And I said, look, this book is going to come out, and it appears as though it’s going to cause a sensation because it has the following ingredients in it. And I told them what they were. And I said, and you are going to be telephoned by journalists, and you have no experience with that. And I want to prepare you for it.

No. 1 is you don’t have to talk to anybody. You can politely hang up or unpolitely (ph) hang up. They’re just journalists, you know. And they’ll be very nice to you. And they’ll say flattering things to you. And they’ll say they know your – their aunt knows your brother who knows their cousin, try to get you to talk but you don’t have to. I said, if you want to talk, that’s fine with me, too. But I want you to know you don’t have to and that you won’t give offense to anyone if you don’t. And you may be well-advised not to, but it’s finally up to you.

He says his mother reacted by worrying that he’d become too grandiose, thinking the book would be a sensation, and that he’d be bound to be disappointed.

Well, he wasn’t disappointed; it certainly was a sensation.

But I have a personal anecdote that dovetails with that one—I can corroborate Roth’s story. You see, shortly after Portnoy was published, to great acclaim and controversy, my parents went on a cruise and became friendly with—of all people—Roth’s parents. When my parents returned, they reported on some conversations they’d had, in which the Roths mentioned how Philip had prepared them for the furor and onslaught from the press, and how to deal with the notion many people would have that they were like the parents in the book.

My parents said that Roths’ parents were nothing like the parents in the book. They were perfectly fine.

What’s more, my mother added, she observed that when the Roths were approached by people saying how proud they must be of their son the writer, they answered that they had two sons and were very proud of both of them.

Roth left that out of his tale (maybe he wasn’t even aware of it), but I’m here to report it.

RIP, Philip Roth. And your parents. And mine.