Would A Young Philip Roth Be Published Today?

I moderated a “dangerous” panel discussion. Everyone survived.

Photo by Sanika V on Unsplash

I just returned from Newark, N.J., where I participated in a conference celebrating the late novelist Philip Roth. March 19 would have been Roth’s 90th birthday, and Newark and its surrounding towns were the subject and setting of much of his work. The conference was called Philip Roth Unbound (a callback to his 1981 novel Zuckerman Unbound) and I was on a panel called “What Gives You the Right? A Conversation about Representation, Imagination, Empathy and Exploitation.”

As the title suggests, the aim of the panel was to disentangle the question of what—and moreover who—novelists are “allowed” to write about in this era of elevated sensitivities. Specifically, we were to discuss these issues through the lens of Roth’s 1998 novel The Human Stain. The book tells the story of Coleman Silk, a 71-year-old classics professor who has lived most of his life as a Jewish man even though he is really a very light-skinned black man. The story involves the protagonist’s “cancellation” (though the novel pre-dates that term) following student complaints over a word he used in a neutral context that was nonetheless interpreted (or, more accurately, twisted for opportunistic purposes) as a racial slur. The irony could not be more plain: an extraordinarily gifted black man whose rise to the intellectual elite would not have been possible had he not passed for white is eventually undone because he’s tarred as a racist. The resulting smear campaign exposes other secrets that destroy his life for good. His wife even has a stroke and dies from the stress.

The Human Stain is among my favorite contemporary novels, so when I was asked if I’d travel across the country to discuss it in front of an audience, I immediately said yes. I even volunteered to be the moderator of the panel. I guess this says something about my idea of a good time, because I later found out that almost every would-be participant who’d been invited onto the panel had declined, presumably due to the problematic nature of some of Roth’s work. More than a few had sent their regrets in the form of sentiments like “Hell no” and “Are you kidding me? Do you think I have a wish to commit professional and social suicide?”