Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth
The first comprehensive assessment of Philip Roth's later novels, Mocking the Age offers insightful readings that explore how these works satirize our contemporary culture. From The Ghost Writer to The Plot Against America, Roth uses humor to address deadly serious matters, including social and political issues, psychological problems, postmodern concerns, and the absurd. In her clear and extensive analyses of these works, Elaine B. Safer looks at how Roth's approach to the comic incorporates...
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The first comprehensive assessment of Philip Roth's later novels, Mocking the Age offers insightful readings that explore how these works satirize our contemporary culture. From The Ghost Writer to The Plot Against America, Roth uses humor to address deadly serious matters, including social and political issues, psychological problems, postmodern concerns, and the absurd. In her clear and extensive analyses of these works, Elaine B. Safer looks at how Roth's approach to the comic incorporates the self-deprecating humor of Jewish comedians, as well as the humor of nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish storytellers and such twentieth-century writers as Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow. Filling the void on critical examinations of Roth's later work, Safer's book provides a thorough appraisal of Roth's lifetime accomplishment and an essential evaluation of his comic genius.
1Introduction : "sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness"12From The ghost writer to The counterlife : comic incongruity and the road to postmodernism173Operation Shylock : the double, the comic, and the quest for identity394Sabbath's theater : sabbath's fear of death - raunchy? : picaresque? : heroic?595American pastoral : the tragicomic fall of Newark and the House of Levov796I married a communist : "a grave misfortune replete with farce"1017The human stain : comic irony and the lives of Coleman Silk1178The dying animal : "pleasure is our subject"1339The plot against America : paranoia or possibility?14710Conclusion : "the farcical edge of suffering"163
