An outsider, he stood with the Jewish giants

Philip Roth was the last major male figure in a generation of Jewish American writers — Salinger, Mailer, Bellow and Heller.

Philip Roth, who died on Tuesday. Picture: AP

Philip Roth was the last major male figure in a generation of Jewish American writers — JD Salinger, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller — whose achievements in American letters can be compared, in terms of cultural efflorescence, with those of the Elizabethan poets and playwrights of Shakespeare’s time. A power and mordancy, a savage, comic, intellectually towering humanism, were their signature and achievement.

Their talent ensured that they did not assimilate into the WASP culture of the day; they took it over, overwhelmed it with talent and moral force. They changed America and its literature forever.

All of which makes it hard for people to remember that Roth started out as a marginal voice in his culture. His vehemence in attack when it came to norms of social, sexual and political behaviour was a function of his outsider status.

His death will meet a moment of legitimate criticism of a certain school of masculinist writing, of which Roth was the most visible, adamant and politically incorrect adherent in America. It will make his passing a moment of reckoning, rather than recognition. And so it should be. He would welcome the criticism; he would relish the controversy.

We can only hope that, when the dust settles, it can be recalled that he, too, was a writer fighting from outside the system. His eloquent and justifiable anger has been borrowed and harnessed by a generation of talented women writers who are rewriting the rules of American literature — its lineage and its focus — just as the generation of Jewish giants did before them.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.