By Philip Roth
1994
400 pgs.
Published by Vintage International
#16 on the NY Times "Best American Works of the Last 25 Years."
Roth is one of the few critically successful writers who has seen it neccessary to acknowledge his own celebrity in his writing. Considering the style of his contemporaries (Pynchon, Updike, McCarthy and Delillo), that should not be taken as a criticism: Roth, after all, is the only of that club to write vaguely metafictional works. Updike may include autobiographical touches, but Roth likes to go whole hog; often making his own narrators successful writers with old sexual perks; it's not going to require Eames and Goren to make the leap. In Shylock he takes it even further, giving the reader two Philip Roth's to deal with, and although it's clear who the fictional imposter is, we read knowing that in reality, both Roths are false creations of the actual Roth. (The temptation to resort to the old "But are they?" is nearly inescapable.) Whether Shylock is to any reader's taste as fiction is more of a personal question--the book, while readable and mildly entertaining, is more like an extended anaylsis of both how good of a writer he is (which most people who haven't read him already assume) and how much of a jerk he probably is (which most people who have read his books already assume). Shylock actually spends so much time dodging an actual plot that by the close, when Roth resorts to the always obnoxious trick of using an epilogue to tell the reader about a "secret, unpublished" chapter, we've spent so much time in his head that it's almost a relief not to have to experience his main character actually do something.
It's not to say that the book is bad--if anything, it plays to Roth's strengths as a writer: decisive satire and anaylsis of American Judaism (with a bit of Zionism thrown in) and an almost sociopathic ability to explicate his own mind. While the political aspects of the book might lead some readers to an interest in Israel, the book is more striking as a portrayal of an intelligent man who, without fully understanding himself, is intent upon explaining his own mind as much as possible. Whether one finds that fascinating is a question most readers can already answer, and, as is often the case with Roth; most probably already have.
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