Jersey Bookshelf: ‘The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography’ by Philip Roth

The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988)
by Philip Roth

Last year, we revisited Philip Roth’s 1967 When She Was Good and his 1974 My Life As A Man. We’re up to the ‘80s now with The Facts, a tell-all by Newark’s favorite son that certainly brings back memories from this reporter of my shared experiences with this author, that of going down the shore to Bradley Beach, attending Weequahic High School and participating in left-of-center politics. We walked the same streets, went to the same temple, and graduated from the same high school. He did it when Newark was mostly Jewish. I did it when Newark was mostly Black.

He remembers when gangs of non-Jewish kids “swarmed out of Neptune, a ramshackle little town on the Jersey shore, and stampeded along the boardwalk into Bradley Beach hollering `Kikes! Dirty Jews!’ and beating up whoever hadn’t run for cover.” He describes Bradley:  “a couple of miles south of Asbury Park on the mid-Jersey coast” as a “very modest little vacation resort where we and hundreds of other lower-middle-class Jews from humid mosquito-ridden North Jersey cities rented rooms or shared small bungalows for several weeks during the summer.” He writes of the 1940s. In the 1960s, nothing had changed, and my mom would take me there every summer where we would share a room and watch professional wrestling in the big communal area downstairs with the others.  Bradley still hadn’t changed in the 1970s when I’d hit those rooming houses running with a friend, smoking pot, and picking up girls to make out with under the boardwalk, making sure to avoid the broken bottles, before taking that boardwalk walk to Asbury and back passing Ocean Grove (which we called Ocean Grave) and Belmar.

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He talks of voting for the “intellectual statesman” Adlai Stevenson and being disappointed that America overwhelmingly favored the war hero Dwight Eisenhower. “Absolutely certain that I was right and that a moronic America was our fate,” he writes, “I sat down thinking that despite  the very obvious classroom consensus, they were the ones who were the dangerous fools.”

Roth blurs the lines between life and art when he has the fictional protagonist of some of his other novels, Nathan Zuckerman, criticize his own non-fiction. He gets intimate and spares no expense—even recounting the buying of a prostitute while his fiancé waits for him in their hotel room—in recounting his sexual exploits.

Philip Roth was born in 1933 Newark and died 85 years later in 2018 New York City.