How Philip Roth Portrayed Women in His Works

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/03/opinion/philip-roth-women.html

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To the Editor:

Re “Philip Roth’s ‘Toxic Masculinity,’ ” by Sam Lipsyte (Op-Ed, May 24):

When I imagine a woman writing about men with the same tone of rapacious objectification as we were subjected to for 50 years under the mind-bending thrall of Philip Roth, I am left at one place only: I know — and many women who write know — that to say something mean or nasty about men in the manner Mr. Roth wrote about women is a recipe for rejection, ridicule and non-publication.

The younger female writers in the United States who have been very successful in the last 25 or so years (it is somewhat different in Canada and Europe) often write lightly fictionalized graphic descriptions of anorexia or addiction or promiscuity cloaked in self-shaming apologia for being.

American women writers (for the most part) have not expressed the same kind of hypersexualized contempt for the opposite sex as Mr. Roth did with signature bravado for fear of offending the market, even if they might let slip a covert admission or two about secretly admiring Mr. Roth.

ERICA REX, TOURS, FRANCE

The writer is a freelance journalist.

To the Editor:

Re “Roth’s Jewish Women,” by Dara Horn (Sunday Review, May 27):

The first book I read by Philip Roth was “Portnoy’s Complaint.” It was in 1970 in London, where I had arrived from Mumbai in September of the year before. I was pregnant and unemployed, so most of my days were spent reading alone at home in a rented basement flat in North Kensington.

Up to that point I had almost no familiarity with American literature, and all my favorite authors were 18th- and 19th-century British novelists. There was nothing in my experience of life or literature that I could “relate” to in Portnoy’s story but, after finishing it, I became one of Philip Roth’s most ardent and lifelong fans.

That anyone could be so funny and write so well about the human condition in all its weirdness, absurdity and vulgarity was a revelation.

I say this because I find Ms. Horn’s complaint about Mr. Roth’s female characters puzzling. I don’t really care that as a woman I have very little in common with Brenda Patimkin of “Goodbye Columbus.” For me the only thing relevant is whether Mr. Roth’s creation (and it is his creation) succeeds as an original work of art. And it does. In spades.

I am so sad that he is gone.

VERA MEHTA, BROOKLYN