The Liberation in Roth’s American Berserk - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Roger Cohen, New York Times

Image from article, with caption: Philip Roth at home in Connecticut in 2006

Excerpt:

“The indigenous American berserk,” Philip Roth’s encapsulation of the country he loved, is a resonating phrase in this time of repetitive school shootings, incontinent presidential tweets, tawdry abuse of public office, rule by mob incitement, manipulation through falsehood, wall obsessions, and the truncation of the English language to a 77-word lexicon “better called Jerkish,” as Roth described Donald’s Trump’s miserable linguistic impact in The New Yorker.

Perhaps Roth timed his exit on Tuesday, at the age of 85, as an admonition to a disoriented nation. His “berserk,” alongside his full-throated celebration of the American panoply and riotous exploration of “the great pervasive Anti-You that someone with a grudge might prefer to call God,” often had a menacing side.

In “American Pastoral,” perhaps his greatest novel, the American dream of Seymour “Swede” Levov, the assimilated Jew of Viking-evoking athletic ability and appearance during his Newark youth, comes apart in the vortex of his daughter’s descent into terrorism. In “The Plot Against America,” it is the whole country that succumbs in 1940 to a president of Nazi sympathies, the flying ace Charles A. Lindbergh. The novel was published in 2004. After Sept. 11, the United States was no longer synonymous with sanctuary, an enduring change in its sense of self. It, too, could be gripped by the unspeakable. ...

Roth offered American space, which is also ever-renewed American possibility. ...

Roth, of course, liberated speech. His was a boisterous Jewish vernacular. ...

Thank you, Philip Roth. “Free at last,” he once wrote. “Or that’s what I would probably be tempted to think if I were either starting out all over again or dead.”