Free In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe

here now, Stella would say that all of this analyzing, all of this cyclical, wordy remorse, all of this endless trying to understand, or saying I’ll never understand, all of this throwing up my hands in the face of human nature, or extolling the self-destructiveness of the age, is just another way of making this about me, rather than her. She would be right, of course: I am stealing the boy all over again.

PART II
Books

The Naked and the Conflicted
    For a literary culture that fears it is on the brink of total annihilation, we are awfully cavalier about the Great Male Novelists of the last century. It has become popular to denounce those authors, and more particularly to deride the sex scenes in their novels. Even the young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be the heirs apparent have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors.
    After reading a sex scene in Philip Roth’s latest novel,
The Humbling
, someone I know threw the book into the trash on a subway platform. It was not exactly feminist rage that motivated her. We have internalized the feminist critique pioneered by Kate Millett in
Sexual Politics
so completely that, as one of my students put it, “we can do the math ourselves.” Instead, my acquaintance threw the book away on the grounds that the scene was disgusting, dated, redundant. But why, I kept wondering, did she have to throw it out? Did it perhaps retain a little of the provocative fire its author might have hoped for? Dovetailing with this private and admittedly limited anecdote, there is a punitive, vituperative quality in the published reviews that is always revealingof something larger in the culture, something beyond one aging writer’s failure to produce fine enough sentences. All of which is to say: How is it possible that Philip Roth’s sex scenes are still enraging us?
    In the early novels of Roth and his cohort, there was in their dirty passages a sense of novelty, of news, of breaking out. Throughout the sixties, with books like
An American Dream
,
Herzog
,
Couples
,
Portnoy’s Complaint
, and
Rabbit, Run
, there was a feeling that their authors were reporting from a new frontier of sexual behavior: adultery, anal sex, oral sex, threesomes—all of it had the thrill of the new, or at least of the newly discussed. When
Couples
, John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust set in a small New England town called Tarbox, came out in 1968, a
Time
cover article declared that “the sexual scenes, and the language that accompanies them, are remarkably explicit, even for this new age of total freedom of expression.”
    These novelists were writing about the bedrooms of middle-class life with the thrill of the censors at their backs, with the 1960 obscenity trial over
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
fresh in their minds. They would bring their talent, their analytic insights, their keen writerly observation, to the most intimate, most unspeakable moments, and the exhilaration, the mischief, the crackling energy was in the prose. These young writers—Mailer, Roth, Updike—were taking up the X-rated subject matter of John O’Hara and Henry Miller, but with a dash of modern journalism splashed in.
    In Philip Roth’s phenomenally successful 1969 novel
Portnoy’s Complaint
, the Jewish hero sleeps his way into mainstream America through the narrow loins of a series of crazy harridans and accommodating lovelies. But are the sex scenes meant to be taken seriously? In
The Counterlife
, Roth’s alter ego, the writer NathanZuckerman, calls himself a “sexual satirist,” and in that book and others Roth’s sex scenes do manage to be both comic and dirty at the same time: “The sight of the Zipper King’s daughter sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her legs flung apart, wantonly surrendering all 5 feet 9 inches of herself to a vegetable, was as mysterious and compelling a vision as any Zuckerman had ever seen.”
    Roth’s explicit passages