Philip Roth: Man Booker International and human comedy

When Philip Roth published his first book, Goodbye, Columbus in 1959 it won a National Book Award, a much-coveted prize among American writers. The event was preceded and followed by controversies. One of the stories in that collection had appeared in the New Yorker earlier, and it provoked Jewish ire for its unflattering portrayal of the community. Roth, himself a Jew, was accused of aiding the anti-Semetic organisations in their propaganda against Jews. After the book came out, and after the award, the anger only intensified, that at one point Roth decided never to write about Jews again. (He couldn’t resist that temptation beyond two books, and throughout his career kept returning to them for his characters).

For those who have followed Roth’s work and his life, neither the announcement that he won Man Booker International nor the controversy that accompanied it came as a surprise. For his fans, his work is Nobel material, and so, a Man Booker International (which is awarded once in two years to a body of work by a writer, unlike Booker which is given every year for a specific book) is not a big deal. The controversy this time seems, at first, not to be around his themes but about his talent.

One of the three judges, Carmen Callil, the founder of a feminist publishing house called Virago, stepped down from the panel objecting to his getting the award, saying she doesn’t rate Roth as a writer at all, that he keeps writing about the same subject again and again (I don’t know where Plot Against America or When she was good would fit in Callil’s scheme of things), and that he might not be read 20 years from now (But, don’t people still read his first book, published 50 years back?). Callil couldn’t convince the other two judges.

I started reading Philip Roth because two journalists I admire hold him in high esteem. Gay Talese and David Remnick. Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra has a Cold’ is a classic. Some time back Esquire called it the best story it ever published. His essays on Mohammad Ali, Floyd Patterson and Joe DiMaggio are worth several readings (The Gay Talese Reader, has them all, in case you are interested). Tom Wolfe has credited Talese with creating ‘The New Journalism’— non-fiction which uses narrative techniques of fiction. But, Talese himself looked up to Philip Roth. “It’s fiction,” he said once of Roth’s work, “but he is also so in touch with the reality of what he’s writing about, no less than Faulkner writing about the south in the 1930s and ‘40s or Hemmingway writing about World War I. And you really get a sense of history in these great works”.

Roth has more than a sense of history, I think. Once, talking to David Remnick for a New Yorker profile, Roth said something that could have come only from a person who had at least some insight into the way the universe works: “All you want to do is the obvious. Just get it right, and the rest is human comedy: the evaluations, the lists, the crappy articles, the insults, the praise.”

The controversy around the prize certainly has elements of a grand human comedy. But this also highlights the fact that these awards —  despite the rigour, the authority and the institutional halo we associate with them— are still about human beings with their own convictions, tastes and prejudices.

Yet, these awards play an important role in the books business. They act as a signal, as a ‘quality guarantor’ for a product that requires several hours of investment from a reader. For a reader faced with increasing demands on his time, and innumerable choices on a bookshelf, an award is like a recommendation by a trusted friend: “You have got to read this book”. Which is why, a Pulitzer or a Booker or a spot in Oprah Book Club immediately shoots up sales. But then, there is a caveat. Awards don’t work that way for well known writers. Because, the reader is familiar with the works and he has already made up his mind about buying or not buying much before an award is announced.

Does this mean yesterday’s recognition wouldn’t matter much to a writer like Roth? After all, he is the most decorated writer in America today and if people are looking for signals, there are quite a few already. But the point is this. While Roth is well known in the US and UK, I am not sure if he has a following outside. This award would open up new markets for him, and more readers from other parts of the world. That seems to be already happening, at least in India. I checked with Flipkart. So far, it has sold only a few hundred copies of his books. (The most popular titles are Nemesis, Humbling and American Pastoral). However, “the sales seems to have picked up since yesterday and we should do a few thousand copies over next few weeks,” a manager there says.

Welcome to the club.