"It stuns me… it stuns me," is the reply Philip Roth repeats to an interviewer who asks him his view on death. Perplexed, astonished, shocked, amazed: all nuances contained in that almost onomatopoeic word. A few months before his own departure from the world, on 25 May 2018, Roth cannot say much more on this subject, painfully aware of the destiny of great artists, who find themselves eternal, to be sure, but nonetheless mortal.
Born in 1933, author of almost forty volumes among novels, stories and essays, Roth left an indelible mark (a "stain", he would have said, as in The Human Stain, 2000) on the literature of the second half of the twentieth century, well into the 2000s, with the last publication under his name dated 2010. A long and very dense journey from that Portnoy's Complaint (Il lamento di Portnoy) which in 1969 brought him to the attention of readers, critics and intellectuals across half the world. Roth had in fact begun to publish exactly a decade earlier, but his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (Addio, Colombo, which contained a short novel and five stories), though positively received, did not have the impact that Portnoy would have. In 1959 Roth is a young graduate student in literature, a lover of Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, two cornerstones of the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel, and his maturation as a writer would pass through the abandonment of the novelistic formula they represented.
The qualities that make Portnoy immediately recognizable as unique and innovative are manifold. First among them precisely the departure from the scheme of the well-made novel in favor of a freer textual structure, thanks to a narrating voice that mimics orality. Then a tragicomic register that becomes one of Roth's personal traits, and not least the ability to insert himself, fully but with sharp originality, into the tradition of the Jewish-American novel, dominated at the time by Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow. These are the postwar decades, those of the so-called Jewish American Renaissance (The Americanization of the Jews, ed. Robert Seltzer and Norman Cohen, 1995), of the era in which the Jewish subject can "finally" be treated without the usual white gloves of respect and reverence, but with a relief by turns ironic or openly comic, with the freedom that befits a novelist and not, as Roth himself put it, with the anodyne detachment of the "public relations men" (George Searles, Conversations with Philip Roth, 1992).
The incipit of the Lamento di Portnoy is dazzling: "She was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise". Even before Woody Allen's mothers flying over the New York sky (New York Stories, 1989), when the stand-up comedians in the night clubs of the East Coast are making American Jewish cultural heritage an incessant source of their humor (the so-called kibbitzing, in yiddish), Roth turns into a novel these small-great manias so typical of that culture. The father who spends his life struggling against constipation and who has a drinking habit, but "not whiskey like a goy, rather mineral oil and milk of magnesia", while the mother "is competing with another twenty Jewish women for the palm of patron saint of self-denial". This Yiddishe mame, protective yet frosty at the same time, who chides him when he will not eat with a "do you want people to look down on a rickety little boy his whole life, or to admire a man?", is the dominant presence in the account given by Alexander Portnoy, the novel's protagonist, in a flow of memories that gush freely while he lies on the psychoanalyst's couch. A perfect escamotage for letting memories of every kind flow without inhibiting brakes, the analytic session becomes the place for airing every detail, even the most "unseemly", of the life of the thirty-year-old lawyer, a little melodramatic and very, very self-ironic, so much so as to earn Roth, from the most conservative sector of the cultural coté to which he belongs, the accusation of being a "self-hating Jew". Moreover, auto-eroticism and sexual promiscuity, which dominate this novel, still manage to scandalize that part of America which, in 1969, is not in step with the epochal changes of those very years (Ann Basu, States of Trial. Manhood in Philip Roth's Post-War America, 2005). And Roth makes of it another recurring motif in his later production. The obsession with the body, which in this novel is fundamentally directed at the male member, projects itself directly into a short novel of 1972, The Breast (translated as La mammella in 1973 and then as Il seno in 2005), a novella in which professor David Kepesh, steeped in the literary metamorphoses of Kafka and Gogol, grotesquely transforms into the object of his desire, an enormous seventy-kilo female breast.
That same Kepesh will return in what, together with Portnoy, is one of Roth's most significant texts, Professor of Desire (Il professore di desiderio), of 1977. As in a saga (Roth had perhaps intuited well in advance that the nineteenth-century seriality of the Anglo-American novel would return and renew itself in the television serial of the third millennium, as criticism holds today), some of his key characters recur from novel to novel, until they form thematic subgroups of his production. There is the series of Zuckerman novels, nine works published between 1979 and 2007 (it includes two of his best known, The Anatomy Lesson and American Pastoral), the series of Kepesh novels (1972-2001), the mature series of the Nemeses (2006-2010) and even the Roth series, because among the many alter egos he resorts to in his unstoppable storytelling vein, the writer also creates an exact double of himself in the novelist Philip Roth, protagonist of five novels, published between 1980 and 2004, among them the dystopian and controversial The Plot Against America (Il complotto contro l'America, 2004).

In such a tangle of narrating voices, alter egos, model authors, narrators, it is impossible to find one's way, also because Roth himself did not at all want the reader to find a way out, but rather to get lost in it, as his own authorial voice gets lost, in the richest sense of the term (it disseminates, scatters, merges), lent in the Professore di desiderio to professor Kepesh. Uncertain about his professional future, the narrating I, Kepesh, says to himself: "it is time to stop impersonating others, it is time to Become Myself. Or at least to begin impersonating the self I believe I ought to be." And these meditations on the specific weight of fictional identity and of real identity lead to the even more fascinating declaration by Zuckerman in the Orgia di Praga (1985) concerning the ineluctable double thread that binds identity and narration: "No, one's own story is not a skin one can slip out of. You do not escape it, it is part of your body and your blood. And you keep telling it as long as you live, this story veined with the themes of your life, this ever-recurring story that is at once your invention and the invention of you" (cf. Pia Masiero, Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld, 2011).
In Roth's vast corpus these two apparently antipodal poles therefore coexist, namely a metaliterary attention to the labyrinthine borders of fiction and a gaze downward, toward the everyday, that repertoire of the ordinary domestic dramas of his Jewish New Jersey which provide the tight-knit weave of his fictional world, though not too fictional. He complained, in fact, that when he wrote autobiographical pieces the public took them for literary invention, and when he wrote fiction readers sought in them connections with his private life. But what sense does it make to probe these borders if his work, as he himself said, was nothing other than traversing "new stages in the writer's perennial apprenticeship". Once a border is identified, Roth has already crossed it. And he has taught us how our relationship as readers with a literary corpus must also be a perennial apprenticeship, a humble listening yet open to the fascination of the other, just as little Philip, in the New Jersey of the Thirties and Forties, listened to the grandmothers who had arrived in the New World from Europe, the babe who did not speak English but yiddish, that diasporic language created over the centuries within the Jewish world of Eastern Europe. Philip understood only a few words, but he listened, full of awe and emotion, to these dialogues at once mysterious and familiar (cf. Elèna Mortara, "Philip Roth, o del vivere in conflitto", introductory essay to the edition of Philip Roth, Romanzi, Meridiani Mondadori, 2017). The adult Philip would then "listen" to the books of others, with an attention that over the decades ensured that his most recognizable signature was, besides the matrix of a "real and everyday" Jewishness (not an orthodox and theoretical Judaism but a Jewishness made of ordinary, secular life), the connection between literature and desire, emblematized by his erotomaniac professors but disseminated, in various forms, throughout all his writings. In an account of Roth's activity, his interventions on literature could not be missing, his "chats" (shop talk) with others and about other colleagues, as the titles of his essay collections declare, Reading Myself and Others (1975, expanded ed. 2001) and Shop Talk. A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (2001), some of which collected in Italian in Perché scrivere? Saggi, conversazioni e altri scritti, 1960-2003 (2018). And in our era of consumption shortened by internet times, quotations from his texts run rampant on social networks, such as that "Be bigger than your feelings", which one hopes may serve as a portal toward his boundless production, together with the other much "worn" aphorism, "Everything we do not know is astonishing, as is everything that passes for knowing".

If Il lamento di Portnoy is Roth's explosive response to the compression and self-repression that had characterized the Jewish American milieu (and not only it) up to the Second World War, the splinters of that explosion are scattered throughout his whole path as a writer, studded with memorable figures, the already cited Zuckerman, Kepesh and Roth, but also all the other men (and a few women) in perennial conflict with a world perhaps only apparently hostile. A product of his maturity, Mickey Morris Sabbath, the protagonist of Sabbath's Theater of 1995 (Il teatro di Sabbath, 1999), is an indecent, brazen, exacerbated, yet intensely vital and captivating failed former puppeteer who wages his solitary and licentious battle against the conformism, the taboos and the rules of a society he deeply despises. To close the circle begun with his human and literary apprenticeship in the second postwar period, Roth publishes Nemesi, a little jewel of narrative virtuosity. Sent to press in 2010, his last novel returns to the origin: set in his native Newark of 1944, it is the tale of a human obsession, indeed of the human obsession par excellence in the face of the ineluctability of destiny, in the face of illness and the threat of death. As with Italo Calvino's Argentine ant, here beyond allegory the protagonist is besieged by the polio that wreaks havoc among the young entrusted to him at the sports field in a New Jersey of equatorial climate, where despair and terror spread among the Jewish families of the Weequahic neighborhood, the neighborhood in which Roth himself had been born and raised. A neighborhood with its smells, its colors, a world of babe, of mame, of fathers and friends and grandparents and youngsters to whom an uncertain present is entrusted, a neighborhood that, it seems, Roth never truly left, still less now that he has revealed himself to be mortal, yes, but eternal.

Alessandro Clericuzio teaches Anglo-American Language and Literature at the University of Perugia. He works mainly on twentieth-century American theater, poetry and fiction, as well as on popular culture and the relations between cinema and literature. Among his recent works, Tennessee Williams and Italy. A Transcultural Perspective, Palgrave, 2016, "La poesia Beat in Italia: uno studio translocal" ("Annali di Ca' Foscari", 52, 2018), and Italia e Stati Uniti nella Grande Guerra, Carocci, 2018.