by Philip Roth
THE LORD: Behold, all that he has is in your power, only upon himself do not put forth your hand.
That was the instruction given Satan by the Lord. And what did Satan do? Exactly as God told him to. Yes, my fellow Fallen, your own Devil became an instrument of God’s wrath.
Let me read to you now from the minutes of the second secret meeting that took place in an unspecified location between the Emperor of Wickedness and the God of Peace. For the sake of brevity I will read to you only the most pertinent material.
THE LORD (speaking of Job): He still holds fast to his integrity.
SATAN: … Put forth thy hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face.
THE LORD: Behold, he is in your power; only spare his life.
And having received this second set of instructions, what did Satan do? Let me read it to you, just as it is written here in their Bible. “So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord, and afflicted Job with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.”
And did Satan spare Job’s life, as God instructed him to? I am afraid the answer is yes, he did that too.
We all remember, I am sure, the unhappy ending to that story. Job’s faith was not broken; it was strengthened and increased. And the Lord, as the record here states, “gave Job twice as much as he had before.”
(Tricky closes Bible. Quickly wipes perspiration from his scales with the back of his claw)
My fellow Fallen, I challenge Satan to refute these charges that I have made here tonight. I challenge Satan to deny his role in the Job case. I challenge him to deny that he acted willingly and knowingly in behalf of the sworn enemies of Hell. I challenge him to deny that if this was not an outright act of treason, it was one so neglectful of the security interests of the Wicked, that Satan might just as well have been in the employ of the Righteous.
Now Satan may prefer to call these actions of his “fiendish” and “diabolical.” But I call what he has done here surrender, and let me tell you something—I think that’s what the leaders in Heaven are calling it, too. Because make no mistake about it—I know the other side. I have met with their representatives. I know the kind of ruthless and fanatical people they are, and I can assure you, if you surrender to their Will, if you think it will stop them to surrender a single soul to their Righteousness, you are sadly mistaken. That will only whet their appetite for more. Because this God of Peace does not just want Job. He wants all the Jobs. And if we do not stop him each and every time, the day will come, my friends, when he will be hammering here at the Gates of Hell.
And that is why I say the time has come to stop appeasing the God of Peace. That is why I say the time has come to step up our own activities, and launch a new offensive in this battle for the minds and hearts and souls of men. For it is nothing less than an ideological battle that we are fighting; and that is why we need a Devil who is willing and able to stand on his ideals. It isn’t the size or the age of a man’s horns that counts—it’s what he’s going to do with them. It’s our whole lives that you should be judging here tonight. It’s what we stand for. It’s what we believe. What I am trying to indicate to you tonight is that the tide of history is on our side, and that we can keep it on our side, because we’re on the right side, and that’s the side of Evil. And let there be no mistake about it: if I am elected Devil, I intend to see Evil triumph in the end; I intend to see that our children, and our children’s children, need never know the terrible scourge of Righteousness and Peace.
Thank you.
THEN I SAW AN ANGEL COMING DOWN FROM HEAVEN, HOLDING IN HIS HAND THE KEY OF THE BOTTOMLESS PIT AND A GREAT CHAIN. AND HE SEIZED THE DRAGON, THAT ANCIENT SERPENT, WHO IS THE DEVIL … AND BOUND HIM FOR A THOUSAND YEARS, AND THREW HIM INTO THE PIT, AND SHUT IT AND SEALED IT OVER HIM, THAT HE SHOULD DECEIVE THE NATIONS NO MORE …
THE BOOK OF REVELATION
ALSO BY PHILIP ROTH
AMERICAN PASTORAL
Swede Levov grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father’s glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede’s beautiful American luck deserts him. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth’s masterpiece.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Fiction/Literature/0-375-70142-7
THE ANATOMY LESSON
At forty, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction—pure pain that takes possession of his spirit. Unable to write, he treks from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Zuckerman himself wonders if the pain can have been caused by his own books.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74902-0
THE BREAST
Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a 155-pound female breast. What follows is an exploration of the full implications of Kepesh’s metamorphosis—a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74901-2
THE COUNTERLIFE
The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape. Illuminating these lives in transition is the mind of Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that’s paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and to reshape history.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74904-7
At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer living in London, and she is an articulate, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage. The book’s action consists of conversations—mainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75294-3
THE FACTS
The Facts is an unconventional autobiography. Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life, including his passionate entanglement with the angriest person he ever met. The book concludes, in true Rothian fashion, with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.
Autobiography/Literature/0-679-74905-5
THE GHOST WRITER
The story of a budding American writer who is infatuated with the Great Books. In the 1950s he meets and falls in love with Anne Frank in New England—or so he thinks.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74898-9
GOODBYE, COLUMBUS
and Five Short Stories
In Roth’s first novel, Radcliffe-bound Brenda Patimkin initiates Neil Klugman of Newark into a new and unsettling society of sex, leisure, and loss. Also included in this volume are five classic short stories.
Winner of the National Book Award
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74826-1
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
In this wickedly satiric novel, Roth turns baseball’s status as national pastime and myth into an occasion for unfettered farce, replete with heroism and perfidy, ebullient word play, and a cast of characters that includes the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74906-3
In a small New England town, Coleman Silk, an aging classics professor, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser.
Fiction/Literature/0-375-72634-9
I MARRIED A COMMUNIST
I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed in the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s.
Fiction/Literature/0-3 75-70721-2
LETTING GO
Set in the 1950s Chicago, New York, and Iowa City, Letting Go presents as brilliant a fiction
al portrait as we have of a mid-century America defined by social and ethical constraints and by moral compulsions conspicuously different from those of today.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-76417-8
MY LIFE AS A MAN
Peter Tarnopol is a gifted young novelist married to Maureen, the woman who wants to be his muse but functions as his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and sustained by moral blackmail but is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen’s death, Peter is still trying futilely to write his way out of it.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74827-X
OPERATION SHYLOCK
In a tour de force of fact and fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Someone of that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse, so Roth must stop him—even if it means impersonating his impersonator.
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75029-0
PATRIMONY
A True Story
In Patrimony, Philip Roth watches as his eighty-six-year-old father—famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections—battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety, and dread, accompanies his father through each stage of his final ordeal, and as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father’s life.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Memoir/Literature/0-679-75293-5
PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT
Philip Roth’s classic novel about “Portnoy’s Complaint,” a disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a deviant nature. With a new afterword by the author for the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75645-0
THE PRAGUE ORGY
In search of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, the American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s. There he discovers, among the oppressed writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of bizarre and poignant adventures, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism. First paperback publication of the epilogue to Zuckerman Bound.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74903-9
THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE
As Roth follows Professor David Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates an intelligent, affecting, and hilarious novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74900-4
READING MYSELF AND OTHERS
The interviews, essays, and articles collected here span a quarter century of Philip Roth’s distinguished career. Here is Roth on himself and his work. Here too are Roth’s writings on the Eastern European writers he has always championed, as well as his views on baseball, the Newark Public Library, American fiction, and American Jews. The essential collection of nonfiction by a true American master.
Literary Criticism & Essays/0-679-74907-1
SABBATH’S THEATER
Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring exceeded even his own—Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past.
Winner of the National Book Award
Fiction/Literature/0-679-77259-6
WHEN SHE WAS GOOD
Set in a small town in the 1940s Midwest, When She Was Good is the tale of Lucy Nelson, who, when she was still a child, had her alcoholic father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75925-5
ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND
In Zuckerman Unbound, the notorious novelist retreats from his oldest friends, breaks his marriage to a virtuous woman, and damages, perhaps irreparably, his affectionate connection to his younger brother and family … and all because of his great good fortune!
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74899-7
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 2001
Copyright © 1971 by Philip Roth
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Sections of this book appeared in somewhat different form in Modern Occasions and The New York Review of Books.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as
follows:
Roth, Philip.
Our gang / Philip Roth.
p. cm.
PS3568. O855
973.924 dc—02/07
CIP
eISBN: 978-0-307-53948-9
www.vintagebooks.com
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