The Facts by Philip Roth
"The Facts" by Philip Roth, subtitled "A Novelist's Autobiography," is a reflective work that presents a series of sketches chronicling key moments in Roth's life, rather than a complete life narrative. It begins with his childhood in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, highlighting his familial dynamics and early interests, particularly in baseball. The second sketch, "Joe College," details his transition to Bucknell University, where he navigates a new, largely Gentile environment while cultivating his literary pursuits.
A central theme of the book is Roth’s tumultuous marriage to a woman referred to as Josie, revealing challenges and creative tensions that arose from their relationship. Roth portrays Josie not only as a source of personal strife but also as a significant influence on his writing. The work also addresses Roth's complex relationship with his Jewish identity and the backlash he faced from the Jewish community when writing candidly about Jewish life.
Roth's introspection culminates in a conversation with his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who critiques Roth's narrative for its gentility compared to his more potent fictional works. "The Facts" ultimately serves as a contemplation of the role of truth and fiction in storytelling, revealing Roth's ongoing struggle to reconcile his life experiences with his literary ambitions. This autobiographical endeavor is positioned within a broader context of cultural expectations and the evolving landscape of Jewish-American literature.
Subject Terms
The Facts by Philip Roth
First published: 1988
Type of work: Autobiography
Time of work: The 1930’s to the 1970’s
Locale: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Chicago, New York, and Massachusetts
Principal Personages:
Philip Roth , a prominent Jewish-American novelistHerman Roth , the author’s father, an insurance salesmanBob and Charlotte Maurer , Roth’s faculty mentors at Bucknell UniversityPolly Bates , Roth’s girlfriend at BucknellJosie , Roth’s tormented and tormenting wifeMay Aldridge , the wealthy, genteel woman with whom Roth spends five years
Form and Content
Though subtitled A Novelist’s Autobiography, The Facts does not attempt a complete chronology of Philip Roth’s works and days. Instead, it is a series of five retrospective sketches, each connected to a crucial stage in the growth of a well-known Jewish-American novelist. Roth begins with an account of his stable childhood in a lower-middle-class Newark, New Jersey, neighborhood where almost everyone was Jewish and his principal interest was baseball. His father, a sedulous insurance salesman denied advancement because of his company’s anti-Semitism, is presented more sympathetically than the fathers in Roth’s fiction. The next chapter, “Joe College,” is a memoir of initiation into a very different environment, the rural, Gentile campus of Bucknell University, where he began to cultivate literary and amorous interests. The section’s climax comes with Roth’s perverse decision to break with his girlfriend Polly Bates, though and because their relationship seemed idyllic.
At the physical and emotional center of the book is Roth’s version of a disastrous marriage to the woman he calls Josie, though her real name—Margaret Martinson Williams—is public knowledge. A bibulous divorcee and mother of two children (whom she abandons), “this wretched small-town gentile paranoid” represented a denial of everything a “nice Jewish boy” was reared to respect. Yet, for all the turbulence of their relationship, Roth credits Josie as his diabolic inspiration, “the greatest creative-writing teacher of them all, specialist par excellence in the aesthetics of extremist fiction.”
“All in the Family” recounts the hostility Roth encountered among Jews when he began writing about them without flattery; he used that hostility as further fuel for his fiction. At the end of the final chapter, after the death of Josie in an automobile accident, Roth breaks with May Aldridge, the loving and loyal antithesis to his wife. Determined to be absolutely independent, he nevertheless recognizes that wish as a chimera. As Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman already discovered in The Counterlife (1987), every life implies a counterlife and the imagination is inextricably entangled in the facts.
Roth frames The Facts with meditations on his uncharacteristic project of writing about his own life. The book opens with a letter addressed to Zuckerman, a fictional character who appears in several of Roth’s novels and, himself a prominent Jewish-American novelist, is something of an alter ego for Roth. Roth explains to Zuckerman why he has now decided to dispense with his usual artifice of fictional surrogates in order to try to represent himself directly. “Is the book any good?” Roth asks. Zuckerman’s response, critical of Roth for being too discreet, too genial, devoid of the furious energy that empowers his finest fictions, comes in a thirty-four-page analysis that constitutes the final chapter of The Facts. It is hardly the last word on its prolific, obsessive author. Zuckerman’s bemusement over “the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into,” a quotation from The Counterlife, provides a suitable epigraph to The Facts and to Roth’s entire career.
Critical Context
If Philip Roth had never written his distinctive fictions, few would probably be interested in his account of a not especially exceptional life away from books. Without the intense and widespread reaction that his stories have provoked, he certainly would never have written The Facts, a maligned and self-maligning author’s attempt to set the record straight by shaping it to fit the category of nonfiction. Just as Our Gang (1971) employed grotesque caricature in order to posit truths about the Nixon Administration and The Ghost Writer (1979) implausibly resurrected Anne Frank in New England in order to discover universal truths about the connections among suffering, love, and art, The Facts marshals verifiable data to create another of Roth’s troubled narratives.
Students of Roth’s career will likely be intrigued by correspondences between events in his life and episodes in his writing. In My Life As a Man (1974), for example, Peter Tarnopol is duped into marrying Maureen Johnson when she feigns pregnancy by borrowing the urine sample of a black woman she encounters in the park. In The Facts, Roth points out that the woman he calls Josie perpetrated virtually the same fraud on him. He claims, however, that this section of My Life As a Man was the most directly autobiographical of his fictions, because he simply could not imagine a more dramatic scenario: “Those scenes represent one of the few occasions when I haven’t spontaneously set out to improve on actuality in the interest of being more interesting.”
Beyond its clues about an author’s sources, The Facts is of interest as a documentation of Roth’s continuing interest in the question of what stance a novelist should adopt toward actuality—antagonism or servility? It is a product of the contemporary culture’s impatience with literary fabrication, the fascination with “true stories” that has accounted for the vogue of the “nonfiction novel” and for the fact that nonfiction regularly outsells fiction. Roth writes his novels with the autocensure of an instinctive witness, and he writes his autobiography with the aspirations of a novelist.
The Facts rehearses the quarrels familiar to readers of Roth’s stories and novels—with the suffocations of motherly love, with the animus of a Jewish establishment outraged at his refusal to be a communal cheerleader, with the refractory nature of women and preliterary life. The Facts appeared only a few months after Arthur Miller, another highly respected American Jewish writer, published Timebends (1987) and a few months before poet Karl Shapiro’s retrospective The Younger Son (1988). Jews are no longer insurgents challenging the peripheries of the literary establishment. Nevertheless, Roth’s autobiography is not a summation or celebration of his success. It is a pause, a somewhat uncharacteristically diplomatic way of pursuing by other means his war with the facts.
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