Roth's women

[Andrew Pollock]

I'm not sure that I Married a Communist is a great example to use, as it was
widely felt that it was written as a deliberate fuck you to Claire Bloom who
savaged Roth in her memoir a year or so before it was published.  I read the
Bloom book, or the parts that were about Roth, and it was indeed very
unkind, in a way that seemed calculated to be sensational.

The last Roth book I read was Plot, and the portrait of the mother was
great.  She was a fabulous character.  The charge of misogyny is a perennial
one against Roth, and there is certainly some basis for it.  I've always
thought, though, that it's one of the things that actually contributes to
Roth being a great writer.  The level of anxiety about women, the struggle
to figure out how the hell to treat them, what to write about them, not only
does this seem to motivate an awful lot of his work, it makes of the books
something more than they would otherwise be.  I don't think Roth is a
misogynist like Dostoevsky was an anti-Semite, Roth also loves women; he has
the complex relationship with women as objects of desire that many men of
his generation did, and he is much more eloquent about the ambivalence of
the position that he's in then most are.  I guess my point is that not
everything is under the author's control (although TP's paranoia tries to
undo that truism), and to the extent that Roth's complicated and sometimes
hateful relationship with women exceeds his control he books are more
interesting and better portrayals of his time.

Andrew
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