Reflecting on Philip Roth in Harper’s not long ago, the journalist Hannah Gold observes that few of the novelists she read during her high school years “captured my imagination and became my companion throughout adulthood the way Roth did.” It is a moist confession familiar to writers who recall clinging to Little Women in faraway childhood with similar ardor. Yet now, in full maturity, Gold sees this transfiguring devotion as touching on “questions of inheritance as a problem of influence.” And in pursuit of such spoor — directly as reporter, aslant as skeptic, but chiefly as admittedly recovering Roth addict — she recounts her impressions of “Roth Unbound,” a conference-cum-dramatic-staging-cum-fan-tour dubbed “festival” that unfolded in March of last year at the New Jersey Performance Center in Newark, Roth’s native city. Stale though it may be, she calls it, in a rare flash of sinuous phrase, “the physical instantiation of a reigning sensibility.” What remains in doubt is whether her recovery is genuine, and whether she has, in fact, escaped her own early possession by the dominance of a defined sensibility. The latterday Newark events she describes mark the second such ceremonial instantiation. The first was hosted by the Philip Roth Society and the Newark Preservation and Landmarks Department, and by Roth himself, in celebration of his eightieth birthday. Unlike during the previous occasion, the 2023 honoree was now in a nondenominational grave at Bard College, but the proceedings were much the same as ten years before: the bus tour of Rothian sites and its culmination at Roth’s boyhood home, the speeches, the critical and theatrical readings, the myriad unsung readers, gawkers, and gossips. With all this behind her — three nights in a “strange bed” in a “charmless” hotel, the snatched meals of chicken parm and shrimp tacos — Gold recalls her fervid homeward ruminations in a car heading back to writer-trendy Brooklyn: I saw before me this distinguished son of Newark, his sentences like firm putty in my mind. I wanted to give them some other form, to claim, resist, and contaminate them, then release them back into the world, very much changed. My whole body went warm just imagining it, turning the words inside out over themselves the way that someone — maybe you, maybe me — peels off a glove. The concluding image echoes an exchange between Mickey Sabbath and a a lover named Drenka, taken from Sabbath’s Theater and quoted by Gold in a prior paragraph: “You know what I want when next time you get a hard-on?” “I don’t know what month that will be. Tell me now and I’ll never remember.” “Well, I want you to stick it all the way up.” “And then what?” “Turn me inside out all over your cock like somebody peels off a glove.” But set all that aside — the esprit d’escalier dream of usurpation, the playing with Roth’s play of the lewd. Despite these contrary evidences and lapses into ambivalence, however pertinent they may be to Gold’s uneasy claim to be shed of Roth’s nimbus, they are not central to her hope of unriddling the underlying nature of inheritance and influence. A decade hence, will there be still another festival, and another a decade after that? Influence resides in singularity, one enraptured mind at a time, not in generational swarms. Besides, influential writers do not connive with the disciples they inflame, nor are they responsible either for their delusions or their repudiations. The power both of influence (lastingness apart from temporal celebrity) and inheritance (reputation) lies mainly in the weight, the cadence, the timbre, the graven depth of the prose sentence. To know how a seasoned reputation is assured, look to the complex, intricate, sometimes serpentine virtuosity of Dickens, Nabokov, Pynchon, George Eliot, Borges, Faulkner, Proust, Lampedusa, Updike, Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Melville, Bellow, Emerson, Flaubert, and innumerable other world masters of the long breath. But what of the scarcer writers who flourish mainly in the idiom of the everyday — in the colloquial? One reason for the multitude of Roth’s readership, as exemplified by the tour buses, is too often overlooked: he is easy to read. The colloquial is no bar to art, as Mark Twain’s Huck Finn ingeniously confirms; and dialogue in fiction collapses if it misses spontaneity. A novel wholly in the first person, and surely a personal essay, demands the most daring elasticity, and welcomes anyone’s louche vocabulary. (Gold is partial to “cum.”) Roth’s art — he acknowledges this somewhere himself — lacks the lyrical, despite Gold’s characterization of it as “sequestered in enchantment,” a term steeped in green fields and fairy rings. Elsewhere she speaks of Roth’s “lyrical force,” but only as it manifests in the context of Sabbath’s immersion in Lear; then is it Roth’s force, or is it Shakespeare’s? Roth’s own furies come in flurries of slyness, lust, indirection, misdirection, derision, doppelgangerism, rant. Gusts of rant; rant above all. Gold’s desire to “contaminate” Roth’s sentences would be hard put to match his own untamed contraries. Nor can she outrun the anxiety of his influence in another sense: she is a clear case of imitatio dei — would-be mimicry of her own chosen god, and more than mimicry: an avarice to contain him, to possess him, to inhabit him, to be his glove. It is an aspiration indistinguishable from sentimentality: emotion recollected in agitation. Gold the ostensibly hard-bitten reporter, the wise-guy put-downer, the breezy slinger of slangy apostrophes, is susceptible to self-gratifying — and hubristic — yearnings. “I’d like to possess Roth in ways I’d hope to see more of his readers do as well: to take what creative, licentious force I need, and identify the Lear-ian corners in my own brain.” But this is to mistake both Roth and Lear. Lear’s frenzies are less licentious than metaphysical. Roth’s licentiousness is more grievance-fueled than
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