Is Philip Roth the male Joan Didion? Asking for TikTok
Philip Roth Image by Getty/Frederick M. Brown/Stringer
By PJ Grisar October 6, 2020
On Thursday the Swedish Academy will determine its newest Nobel Laureate in Literature. Until today, that precise conversation — had several years ago — was probably the last time anyone was comparing Joan Didion and Philip Roth’s literary legacies.
Enter a new, viral TikTok where a young woman has claimed, “Philip Roth is Joan Didion for people who aren’t secure enough in their masculinity to read Joan Didion.”
“Phillip Roth is JOAN DIDION for people not secure in their masculinity to read Joan Didion” is maybe the most accursed sentence of pure stupidity I’ve heard in a while pic.twitter.com/3qYi4S4hNu
— Iva Dixit (@ivadixit) October 6, 2020
The world of literary Twitter responded with a resounding: Huh?
I mean, I guess they both write in English?
It’s hard to see how Didion, celebrated for her essays and journalism that penetrate everything from the Summer of Love to shopping malls to American and (regrettably) Salvadorian politics, can be compared to Roth, primarily a novelist whose perennial themes are the Jewish-American experience, the male libido and the foundering American dream. I suppose they share that last one, but what great American writer doesn’t?
Forgetting their completely different backgrounds (opposite coasts; transient, WASPY Didion; rooted, Jewish Roth), forms (Didion has a few novels, sure, but she’s known for her nonfiction) and styles, it’s worth looking at how others have used their work to style themselves.
These two can often be found together on a certain type of bookshelf. Both are known for being wry and erudite. And while Roth always projected a kind of working-class attitude in his canon— as opposed to the glamorous Didion, who wrote Hollywood screenplays and tagged along with The Doors in between nursing migraines — both generated books that were prized as status symbols. The two were contemporaries, who both resented the society that was their widest readership. Both were published in the New York Review of Books. ‘Nuff said.
Except Roth should have the last word here, re: this TikTok that is, at its core, about projecting a certain kind of straight, Millennial, masculine intellectualism.
Asked about the success of his novel “The Plot Against America,” Roth told LitHub in 2006 that sales don’t influence his work or his view of his readers.
“It doesn’t change my opinion of the cultural facts,” Roth said. “If it’s this book or Joan Didion’s book that strikes the fancy of people, it doesn’t change the fact that reading is not a source of sustenance or pleasure for a group that used to read for both.’”
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture reporter. He can be reached at Grisar@Forward.com.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
