Roth deliberately refused to resolve whether his tribal capitulation was sincere or parody

Evidence

In a blazing 1963 Commentary essay, “Writing About Jews,” Roth had said that it was the job of a novelist neither to perform propaganda for his ethnic group nor to concern himself with parochial questions like “What will the goyim think?” Thirty years later, was he letting us know that he had changed his mind, that he was ready to do his tribal duty? Or was the entire ending parody—Roth toying with his Jewish critics by saying: Look, Rabbi, I’m doing state propaganda, like you always wanted me to—even letting the Mossad hack apart my book! Am I a good Jew now? Or maybe he didn’t want to choose: maybe he was telling us that he was both that and this. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1007

Categorization

• QUESTION: Klein leaves Roth’s intent genuinely open — this is the hinge on which her claim about how the ethnic double works actually depends. Worth chasing whether she ever resolves it.
• XREF: The ‘both that and this’ refusal of a single identity echoes the entire doubling architecture of the book — Klein is reading Roth as a fellow practitioner of the double-identity device.