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Fairness doctrine

By Chris Colcord

Fort Wayne Reader

2018-05-31

When Philip Roth died on May 22nd, my daughter texted me the news, for she knew how affected I would be by it and she wanted to console me. I rarely feel diminished by a celebrity's death but this one knocked me back a bit — I caught up with Roth pretty late in the game, with his 1997 novel American Pastoral, but that novel's virtuosity and exuberance caused me to seek out the rest of his oeuvre. I've read everything since.

American Pastoral was noteworthy for it kicked off one of the great late-career surges in American literary history; after American Pastoral, Roth published a series of extraordinary novels: I Married A Communist; The Human Stain; The Plot Against America. When American Pastoral was published, Roth was 64 and already had established a career that placed him firmly in the pantheon of post-war American writers (Updike, Bellow, McCarthy) and yet he wasn't ready to quit and simply do victory laps the rest of his career. Each novel directly after American Pastoral showed him at the peak of his talents; I bought all of them, through Exit Ghost in 2007, and was awed by the sustained brilliance. And I was fascinated by Roth himself and his hermit-like existence — he seemed desperate to hole up in his farmhouse and write, like he was trying to outrun mortality and oblivion by completing his life's vision. For any writer convinced that his stories desperatelyneed to be shared with the world — and really, what writer doesn't think that — Roth's dedication serves as a great example of the necessity of finishing your work.

But Roth was controversial and included in the tributes after he died were a number of bitter repudiations of his significance. The most seized-upon criticism was Roth's depiction of women, and the demeaning, misogynistic way he seemed to view the (largely Jewish) women in his novels. The writer Dara Horn, in her New York Times opinion piece, "What Philip Roth Didn't Know About Women Could Fill A Book," was particularly damning about Roth's seeming indifference to the inner life of his female characters. "Philip Roth's works are only curious about Philip Roth," she says, dismissively. Ruth Franklin, book critic for Harper's, wrote that she was sad Roth wasn't more interested in seeing women and their experiences. I follow a number of women writers on Twitter, and a lot of them felt similarly. One playwright was practically tap dancing on Roth's grave at the news of his death.

I'm afraid criticisms like this bring out a barely-controlled rage in me, and I hope it's not because I'm a latent misogynist, or that I'm simply a blind devotee to Roth's work. I'm not inherently opposed to negative opinions about one of my favorite writers. In the wake of Roth's death, I've read some very smart, insightful criticisms of Roth that seemed wholly accurate to me.

But what I find most galling about the criticisms is contained in that aforementioned quote from Dara Horn: "Philip Roth's works are only curious about Philip Roth." Good God: couldn't you say the same about 70% of all novelists? Most (not all) novels that I cherish are dominated by a protagonist who is obviously a stand-in for the author. We see the world and the action of the novel through his eyes, and it's those perceptions that determine our appreciation for the story. If that feels like a limitation to you, then I'm afraid you're being a little harsh on writers. We've only had one writer who seemed limitless in his understanding of the human condition, after all, and that's Shakespeare, and we're lucky to have had him at all.

And while I'm all for fairness and equality and tolerance in daily life, there's one place where fairness holds no currency, and that's in the imagination of the writer. The act of creation simply cannot be allowed to be torpedoed by this; writers who begin a project with a conscious effort to be fair and honorable and inoffensive are making a conscious effort to produce a disaster. Your limitations and flaws will be on display, make no mistake, but without the freedom to commit these errors, your voice can't be anything but fraudulent. Or more likely: you'll never finish what you're writing. You'll be so pole-axed by indecision that you won't be able to write two sentences without pondering their fairness.

Here's Pauline Kael, from her 1971 review of Peter Bogdanovich's film The Last Picture Show, based on the novel by Larry McMurtry: "The girls are seen only from the boys' point of view; this is perhaps an indication of McMurtry's and Bogdanovich's limited understanding rather than a deliberately chosen perspective, but truth to one's experience is far more important in a writer and a director than a hollow 'fairness' doctrine."

Shout it from the rooftops: "Truth to one's experience is far more important in a writer than a hollow 'fairness' doctrine." (I should maybe point out here that Kael was probably despised by many of the same people who hated Roth.) Roth never produced a Rosalind, a Portia, a Nastasha Rostova, or an Amanda Wingfield, but does that mean it's right to invalidate what he did produce? If a book doesn't have a "strong female character," does that mean that it has no value? If a writer has no desire to create a female character with dimension and personality, is he supposed to just whip one up, anyway? I get so weary of critics who can only review anything with that pre-emptive checklist in mind. And isn't the concept of a "strong female character" becoming kind of a cliché? And, you know, kind of boring? Do they have to be strong? Can't they be weak, self-destructive, perverse, mocking, humorous, brilliant? Or do they just have to be "strong," because we have to right a couple centuries of wrongs, right now? Roth only was curious about Roth, maybe that's true, but he seemed honest about his obsession and maybe that's all we should hope for in a writer.