In his essay recalling the writing of The Plot Against America (2004), Philip Roth distils his father's defining characteristic: “my father, with all the vast energy he was able to pour into what I call his ‘reforming instincts.’”Footnote ¹ He is referring to Herman Roth's drive to ensure fairness in everyday life. However, if Herman seeks to reform those around him, in this novel Roth portrays a father who can also reform himself to benefit his family. Roth, so often accused of misogyny, portrays a father whose masculinity is not fixed in stereotyped gender roles but is responsive to his family's needs in the dangerous environment in which they find themselves in the 1940s. Using Raewyn Connell's thesis that family life compromises hegemonic (or complicit) behaviour as a critical context, I argue that this novel presents a rather progressive portrait of family connections and masculine identity. This is especially apparent when situated within Roth's oeuvre, and this article considers The Plot Against America as a departure from Roth's previously antagonistic representations of family relationships.

Maintaining hegemonic masculinity within a family environment can be problematic because, as Tony Chapman, among others, contends, such a masculine identity is firmly associated with professional reputation rather than with family responsibilities. Chapman summarizes the American attitude to men in work:

This said, the dual indicators of maturity in men are marriage and family duties; these additional responsibilities do not necessarily fit easily with the imperative of professional success. Indeed, Connell has argued that rather than factors that bolster hegemonic masculinity, the roles are antagonistic:

It is the compromise between these two masculine roles – hegemonic and family man – and responsibilities that this article explores through the character of Herman Roth. While Roth's work has been analysed in the light of gender studies (mostly notably by Debra Shostak), these considerations have often focussed either on Roth's representation of women or on the more misogynistic attributes of his male characters rather than on any insecurities of masculine identity they portray.Footnote ⁴

Roth has often used the family as a location for internal Jewish politics: broadly speaking, the clash between old values and assimilated, secular values. David Brauner characterizes Roth's work up to The Counterlife (1986) as “dramatis[ing] the tensions between Jewish fathers and sons, rival brothers, writers and critics – Jews judging, condemning, betraying and undermining one another.”Footnote ⁵ However, although these tensions are not completely absent from his memoirs, The Facts (1988) and Patrimony (1991), which followed soon after The Counterlife, in these quite personal accounts Roth seems to offer a more affectionate representation of his own family, and this acceptance has carried over into much of his later fiction, especially The Plot Against America.

Certainly the family is not a new setting or subject for Roth; there has always been an underlying affection towards family, despite exploring or exploiting some of its absurdities. However, a case can be made for The Plot Against America as the novel most warmly appreciative of the family. This is not to say that it is a one-dimensional work; certainly, the family is not without its fractures, such as Philip's flights and Sandy's allegance to the Just Folks programme. However, Bess and Herman are always sympathetic characters, and it is to the family unit that Philip returns at the novel's close. Throughout this work, Roth's tribute to the Jewish family is more obviously elegiac than in his other novels, despite a change in tone having been present in his work since Patrimony. Arguably it is since his father's death, and his reconciliation with their awkward relationship through Patrimony, that Roth's representations of family contain much more warmth. While families may always have been fondly drawn, the jibes that protagonists made against their unremarkable forebears seem to have given way to characters with an admiration for the stoic ordinariness and best hopes represented by their parents and community elders (one can look to Dean Caudwell in Indignation (2008) and Dr. Steinberg in Nemesis (2010) as examples). As Ross Posnock suggests, “The Plot Against America is arguably Roth's most emotionally reconciled novel.”Footnote ⁶ While this perhaps simplifies the Philip character and his changeable attitude towards his father, I would contend that the final and lasting effect of the novel is to reaffirm the family as integral to a child's feeling of safety and to praise the parents who strive to provide this. Posnock contends that this positive tone is all the more obvious against previously negative representations of the family: “until The Plot Against America an essay title ‘Attachment in the Novels of Philip Roth’ would make for very quick reading indeed”.Footnote ⁷

Though not the focus of this article, Roth's novel has gained critical attention for its detailed historical setting. Steven G. Kellman argues that “though the plot of The Plot Against America is refracted through the eyes of a boy named Philip Roth, this novel sets its sights on broad historical developments,”Footnote ⁸ whereas Gurumurthy Neelakantan proposes almost the opposite:

Clearly the two aspects are intertwined and the drama of the novel unfolds on two levels: the family unit and the nation. To mirror this, the response to the novel can be largely categorized into two camps: those interested in the novel's self-reflexivity caused by Roth's use of his own family and those concentrating on its supposed censure of the Bush administration. Roth denies the latter, but acknowledges his family history as a key part of this text:

Much more has been written about the truth of the historical events in the novel and their relevance to contemporary politics than about the truth of the representation of the Roth family, yet it is this that Roth highlights as his own interest.

In The Facts (1988), Roth writes of the sanctity of family and its defensive role against external threats to its individual members:

Yet while Roth has often put his male protagonists within a family environment, the men have seemed largely frustrated with the restriction this collective has on their freedom rather than benefiting from any comfort it supplied. Fathers in particular are figures of turmoil in the Roth canon; as Benjamin Hendin asserts, “Roth's books are full of fathers who cast an inescapable influence on their sons”.Footnote ¹² For example, the Zuckerman Bound series chronicles not only an artist's life but also a son's obsessive shame at disappointing his father. In this series of novels, every one of Zuckerman's actions is a reaction to his father, and while he pledges to “forget fathers,” he never can.Footnote ¹³

For the most part, Roth, as Hendin has noted, has written on “the condition of being a son,” rather than of being a father.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet American Pastoral (1997) offers two fathers who are juxtaposed in their approach to childrearing. Whereas the Swede certainly makes mistakes with Merry – arguably stemming from their illicit kiss – Lou Levov, as Elaine B. Safer avers, “can be considered the moral center of the novel”.Footnote ¹⁵ Catherine Morley concurs, arguing, “That Lou Levov is allowed the final word in Seymour's narrative suggests a possible inability, on the part of the writer (not unlike the protagonist), to step from beneath the shadow of the precursor.”Footnote ¹⁶ While the Swede's family and marriage dissolve before his eyes, Lou stays true to the sentiment expressed by Roth in The Facts. Indeed, Lou can be considered an opinionated and stubborn father character comparable to the Herman Roth of The Facts and Patrimony. Not only do both attempt to preserve the sanctity of the family, both also identify an outside, corrupting threat. For Lou, this is moral degradation that is affecting both American society and the American family, symbolized by Watergate and Deep Throat. For Herman, it is the increasing deprivation he observes in his urban surroundings; while he can cope with the changes – as shown in Roth's retelling of his father giving a young black mugger a life lesson while being robbed – they still remain a threat.

Perhaps Roth's best-known family, though, is the Portnoys. Most sustained critical interest has been in the mother, Sophie, with critics citing her as the cause of Alex's problems. However, in her article that uses family systems theory as a critical framework, Sarah Eden Schiff argues that it is the parental unit as a whole – “Jack Portnoy and his underfunctioning just as much as … Sophie and her overfunctioning” – that causes Alex to act out.Footnote ¹⁷ As Schiff notes, as much as Alex derides his mother's interference, he despairs of his father's lack of interest in anything other than his digestive tract. This parental pair collectively embody the imbalance that George J. Searles suggests is integral throughout Roth's body of work: “Parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers in Roth's fiction encounter problems because they are unable to strike a balance between involvement and detachment, between indulgence and restraint.”Footnote ¹⁸

These dual dynamics of mother and father, parents and children, are equally visible in The Plot Against America. Although Roth offers complex and full characterizations of all members of the Roth family to bring them into his fiction, it is perhaps Herman who is most lovingly drawn and who is most integral to the plot; indeed, the thought often in Roth's mind when writing was, “what would my father have done?”Footnote ¹⁹ The long-term Roth reader already knows Herman from the account of him offered in Patrimony, but this counteraccount is of the young and vital Herman, not the old and failing; I would suggest that it is at this point in Herman's life that Roth perceives his father at his most masculine, both in terms of his age/physicality and due to his adoration of him when a child.

In addition to fathers in Roth's previous work, Herman also exists against stereotypes present in Jewish American fiction. Carol Iannone identifies the Portnoys' dynamic as a clichéd trope in literature: “the belligerently nurturant Jewish mother often predominates, while a mild-mannered husband shuffles quietly in the background or lies cooperatively in the grave … the Jewish mother [is] a more familiar literary figure than the Jewish father.”Footnote ²⁰ Furthermore, Andrew Gordon argues that when a father figure is present, he usually conforms to one of three archetypes: “the nebbish, under the thumb of his assertive, talkative wife”; “the tyrant who rejects his offspring”; or “the absent father.”Footnote ²¹ Yet The Plot Against America portrays a father who is none of the above and is equally involved in both the family and the text.

For this novel, Roth uses his own family, but the formation – mother, father and two children – is stereotypical of what is considered the American norm. Jon Bernardes states that the nuclear family is a pervasive and seductive myth in America, characterizing the dynamic thus:

Therefore, although recent studies by family historians and psychologists have attempted to dispel the myth of the perfect nuclear-family prototype, the nuclear family remains the standard model against which all other family formations are judged, just as all masculinities are evaluated against hegemonic masculinity.Footnote ²³ It is these conventions that the Roths, and Herman in particular, both conform to and subvert in the novel.

This novel is another of Roth's texts set in Newark, which is a safe haven for the Roths, and an enclave of secular Jewish camaraderie. In the same way, family is a protective force for nine-year-old Philip. The Roths are a nuclear family, as Bernardes has defined it. Pre-Lindbergh, the Roth family was normal; not without worries, but neither fearful nor persecuted. Roth describes their ordinariness:

This shows a nuclear family working together to survive the Depression. Unlike Faulkner's Bundrens or Steinbeck's Joads of the same era, the Roths managed to hang on to a reasonable standard of life. Importantly, they do so without Bess Roth taking paid employment, thus initially bolstering Herman's complicity with traditional constructions of masculine identity.

This is the norm within the Weequahic community, with responsibilities divided along gender lines:

It is interesting that Roth does not need to elucidate the tasks that men performed; the fact they were at work for these fifty-plus hours a week is enough to fix in the mind of the reader that they worked hard. However, Roth does underscore the sheer amount of work that women did through his exhaustive list; that he finds it necessary to do so rather than to say that the women were occupied for a similar amount of time in the home attests to the prejudices of public and private spheres of work, with the former more valued than the latter. Yet Roth does not seek to undermine or reinforce the importance of traditional sex-roles; by merely giving the truth of his childhood, he equalizes the roles of the nuclear family. Indeed, there seems to be a parity in the drudgery of both men and women's roles; Roth clearly admires the work ethic inherent in both his fictionalized parents and their contemporaries within the community. Whatever the surrounding arguments made concerning women's inequality at this time, for the purposes of my argument here such a dynamic reinforces the nuclear family as the ideal and normal model for the society established within the novel.

Much as the family unit can be evaluated against the supposed norm of the nuclear family, so Herman can be compared to dominant forms of masculinity. At the outset of the novel, it is Lindbergh who is the most convincing exemplar of hegemonic masculinity. He is the American ideal personified: good-looking, courageous, strong, ambitious, and successful:

Both Roth boys find Lindbergh an alluring hero figure, and as such, he is one of the archetypes of masculinity against which Herman is measured by his sons. Burgess contends that behind “the father stands the archetype of the father … no parent has the luxury of a clean sheet against which to operate. Whatever any father does is measured against images which simultaneously amplify and dwarf the process of human fathering.”Footnote ²⁷ The Lindbergh ideal certainly informs the boys' estimation of what being a man should entail. Yet the qualities that Lindbergh exhibits as a hegemonic exemplar are not necessarily those that Philip and Sandy require in their father. David Cohen argues that the “heroes of fiction are powerful, but according to psychoanalysts, most children find their original hero in their families. Boys look up to their father and try to be like him. Daddy is the first hero.”Footnote ²⁸ Cohen asserts that the father may not be the most interesting of heroes, but he is the reality: “This ‘hero’ has rather fewer dashing qualities but he is dependable, present, a figure of authority.”Footnote ²⁹ In this novel, too, although Philip is momentarily seduced by obvious heroes like Lindbergh and cousin Alvin, the reader is shown that it is his father who is his protector. If Lindbergh takes normalcy to heroic extents, then Herman is heroic in a normal, quiet way.

The other key exemplar of hegemonic masculinity against whom Herman is measured is Alvin. Roth believed his family to be so normal that even with the Lindbergh threat, there would have been little tension in the ranks without the invention of Alvin, a cousin who brings chaos to the nuclear family. The young man has a set of strong principles and is willing to take them to the limit, even going to war in accordance with them. Conversely, Herman lets go of his principles if they endanger his family. For example, he takes Cucuzza's gun after refusing it the first time, arguing that, as an American, he should not need it to defend his family (even if, paradoxically, this is his Constitutional right). This concession of principles conforms to Connell's thesis that men renegotiate their masculinity when they have family responsibilities. It is the family's safety, rather than his own, that Herman seeks to protect; his actions might have been different without them counting on his protection. Alvin, however, has no such close family to consider and can follow his convictions. Nevertheless, although Alvin may be considered complicit with these traditional and physical ideals, Philip loses respect for him:

For Philip, Alvin's disloyalty to the family overrides his heroism and therefore reverses the order of masculine ideals; Philip's father becomes his exemplar of correct masculinity, indicating that Herman's will to survive through resistance rather than action is still heroic. The text shows that wars are fought both at the fronts and at home, and the battles fought at home often come with less recognition. Moreover, this complements Connell's theory; she asserts that circumstances and political context alter the qualities that are lauded as hegemonic. Thus Herman's stability becomes “the currently most honoured way of being a man, requir[ing] all other men to position themselves in relation to it.”Footnote ³¹

Yet it should be noted that Herman is not without his moments of active bravery. Echoing Alvin's example, his rescue of a neighbourhood kid from his Lindbergh-induced exile is described in military terms, associating Herman with archetypal masculine norms:

The injuries Herman carries were sustained in a fight with Alvin – the last straw in their strained relationship, and a symbol of their divergent views and differing forms of masculinity. At this point it is Herman who becomes more closely associated with stereotyped masculine ideals, while Alvin is utterly disillusioned and inactive. This again supports Connell's thesis of hegemonic masculinity; like any gender identity, it is fluid and performative. It is reinterpreted through outside agency (in this case both Philip and the reader), it is dependent upon the environment that surrounds it, and it evolves accordingly. Indeed, Herman's bravery is all the more noble when the context – his relationship with Alvin – is considered; even having lost and been hurt by the one orphan he took in, he is still willing to risk further danger to himself to save another. Herman knows how important the protection of a family is, and tries to give this to Seldon, who is surely the most tragic figure in the novel, losing the majority of his family and consequently becoming a victim almost comparable to the Jews in Europe.

Nonetheless, despite his moment of archetypal bravery, Roth suggests that Herman's real heroic quality is his loyalty to his family, which is less complicit. His commitment to a boring insurance job, in which he has clearly reached the glass ceiling as both a Jew and a high-school dropout, indicates his willingness to serve his family. Echoing Cohen's contention of what a father should be, Herman is, as Roth typifies his real father, “hardworking, tremendously responsible, tremendously dutiful, tremendously predictable, everything that is paradise for a kid.”Footnote ³³ This sentiment notwithstanding, within the family dynamic the primary commitment of men tends to be continuous paid employment, and, as Chapman notes, failure to achieve this is considered “a fundamental lack of character.”Footnote ³⁴ However, masculine identity tends to demand more than just continuation; credibility comes from professional upward mobility. Accordingly, in career terms, Herman is not complicit with the hegemonic ideal. Although he maintains the family's security during the Depression, he is forced out of his job by the Homestead 42 Act – a government directive that pushes Jews who want to keep their jobs into rural regions to split their urban communities. During the early stage of the crisis, employment is less important to Herman's masculine identity than his principles. As Philip understands, Herman

In this passage, Philip identifies two signifiers of masculinity: a work ethic and a strong set of principles. He seems to imply that in times of pressure, the pursuit of one will forfeit the other; thus Herman's masculine identity must evolve to absorb a change of circumstances, proving again the fluidity of identity.

Nonetheless, Herman finds replacement work immediately. He takes a job from Uncle Monty, working at the Miller Street market, and works just as hard, if not harder, at this; but it is a poorly paid job that comes with less status. As a result, he is unable to support the family single-handedly. To augment their income, Bess goes to work selling dresses at Hahne's. Linda L. Lindsey offers an overview of the impact the Depression had on masculinity, and this can be transposed as useful in considering Jewish masculinity in the Lindbergh context. She writes:

Yet Herman does not appear threatened by this new economic equality in their partnership, which effectively undercuts any hegemonic complicity; he looks at it pragmatically, as something that needs to be done for the family to survive. This shows that the role of father and mother can evolve in accordance with circumstances; as Burgess argues, “Parenting styles are determined not by gender but by situation … many of the so-called gender differences between mothers and fathers may be situational in origin.”Footnote ³⁷

Despite economic power divisions blurring, it is important to note that Herman retains control in the family. The Roth family is built along patriarchal lines, with Herman making the most consequential decisions and Bess making those that impact on the running of the household. Indeed, as Neelakantan notes, Bess is traditionally situated in the nurturing role; he terms her “a classic example of solicitous maternalism.”Footnote ³⁸ The emotional stability of the father thus seems to be the key to keeping the family together. Philip presumes that reserved comportment is a universal male quality; he is surprised by the reaction to the Lindbergh nomination even though he comprehends the gravity of this event:

As well as playing on stereotypes of stoical masculinity (the opposite being hysterical femininity), this passage also highlights the severity of the situation. Despite day-to-day lives that included phenomenal amounts of hard work, these second-generation Jews felt that they had been accepted as citizens of America and had consequently been living rather uneventful but happy lives. As such, this turmoil represented a massive break in the New World idyll for which their parents had hoped and for which they continued to strive. Their response to this is to discontinue behaviour that is expected of them as men more generally, and as Jewish men more specifically. It is interesting too that the men's first response is not fear but outrage and anger, suggesting, perhaps, a kind of preconditioning that both expects and knows how to contend with anti-Semitism.

Yet, overall, Herman seems aware of the importance of remaining in control for his family, as two scenes on the Washington trip attest: he argues with the police when they force his family from the hotel, and he sings to cover anti-Semitic jibes in the cafeteria. In his essay on the novel, Roth asserts that humiliation is a formidable force to overcome:

Herman refuses to be humiliated and channels these feelings into fury. Although Lindbergh's threat is not realized in the novel, Herman's resistance is courageous in its context. As Roth notes, “I discovered that my father's stubbornness, which was notorious, had another side to it in a situation like this; it was resistance; it was defiance.”Footnote ⁴¹ Herman is shown to be wise; wariness and paranoia – so often charges brought against Jews by anti-Semites – are justified here.

If the patriarchal structure of the Roth family is to be upheld, which Neelakantan argues it is – Bess “privilege[es] the patriarch of the family with authority and control” – then control should be a gendered quality in the novel.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, according to Connell's hierarchy of identities, it must be. She argues that exemplars of hegemonic masculinity stabilize the gender order as well as dominate women and alternative masculinities. In keeping with this structure, when Bess reacts emotionally to the anti-Semitism they experience on their Washington trip, her children are largely unconcerned, yet when their father breaks down Philip is horrified. Philip recalls Herman's return from visiting newly amputated Alvin:

Gender stereotyping dictates that Herman's tears be considered, as Mary Chapman and Glen Hendler state, “conventionally … feminine,” signalling weakness.Footnote ⁴⁴ For young Philip, crying symbolizes his father's loss of control; he does not just cry but bawls without self-censure. His father, as a man and head of the family, should know what to do, and his inability in this case terrifies the boy. Philip's parents are his only security, and he is understandably terrified of losing them. When Seldon's father dies, Philip is convinced it is his own father and becomes hysterical. To calm him, his mother tells him,

Here, Bess reasserts the insolvency of the family, stressing normality and unity. Interestingly, although Philip seems most concerned about his father, he is almost as distraught when his mother goes missing for a short period, becoming convinced that his father would marry Seldon's mother and alter the structure of their family. Thus, for Philip, it is the family unit as a whole – not his father or mother alone – that offers security against the perilous external environment, but the responsibility for keeping it solvent is firmly fixed in his father's realm.

In Brauner's analysis of the novel, he focuses on the Philip character, contending that “Philip repeatedly attempts during the course of the novel to disown his parents (and thus the Jewishness that they pass on to him) by adopting other identities.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Brauner notes that this rebellion is caused by the hostile environment Philip finds himself in; he asks, “What causes this retreat from everything – family, friends, community, culture, history, the ability to speak and to hear – that ordinarily constitutes, and protects, a child's sense of identity? Trauma.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Brauner asserts that Philip's dislocation from his parents, and the failure of his parents to keep him feeling safe, effectively “artificially accelerat[es] Philip's internal development,” and though the novel ends without the worst happening, Philip can never go back to being a child.Footnote ⁴⁸ Kellman seems to concur with Brauner, arguing that Philip

Although Philip certainly feels this guilt and responsibility, his acting out is a manifestation of his anxiety over his father's lack of control, not his own. Not yet a man, it is his father's masculine identity that concerns him rather than his own. Moreover, while Brauner's is certainly a valid analysis of the character arch of Philip, Herman never stops trying to protect his boys; the severity of the environment means that no father could ensure his children felt completely safe.

Indeed, Herman does a better job than most; the Roths are the only family that stay together in the novel. The Wishnow family is destroyed by the death of the parents, which, certainly in the case of the mother, is caused by the Lindbergh initiatives, and other families flee to Canada. Even the Lindberghs, the supposed perfect American couple, cannot keep their family together. The integrity of the family is as important to Herman as it is to Philip, and he does whatever is necessary to keep them together. This willingness to go to extreme lengths includes forsaking extended family, such as Bess's sister and Alvin. He banishes Alvin to preserve family safety; he tells his wife,

Immediate family is Herman's only concern in the troubled time; as Alan Cooper notes, “Herman's integrity inoculates his wife and children but cannot extend to his relatives. The plight of his nephew Alvin sounds the bass note of the novel.”Footnote ⁵¹ Against well-known accounts of non-Jews helping and hiding Jews across Nazi Europe, this may seem callous but the effect is to emphasize Herman's commitment to his wife and sons.

Despite a few emotional outbursts, Herman is resolute. He remains largely stoic and patient with his sons, even when Sandy becomes involved with the Lindbergh initiatives. Contrary to the advice of his father and the pleading of his mother, Sandy enrols with the Just Folks programme and spends the summer in Kentucky. He returns with a new accent and disrespect for his father's opinions. Herman is pushed to the limit when Sandy is invited to the White House. When he tells Sandy he is forbidden to go, Sandy hits back, accusing his father of having the old Jewish persecution complex, and telling him, “you're a dictator worse than Hitler.”Footnote ⁵² Herman retains his composure, and it is Bess who punishes her son:

Returning to the issue of gendering control, this episode undercuts Herman as a hegemonic exemplar and instead confirms the flexibility of the family. While this passage suggests Herman's patriarchal power within the family by Bess's willingness to enforce his law, this is somewhat undermined because it is Bess who issues the punishment. In this moment of violence – always considered a masculine trait – she assumes a powerful role: someone the boys fear. As Cohen notes, in nuclear families the father is a figure of authority, yet in The Plot Against America authority is not a gender-defined role; both Herman and Bess discipline their children and the children seem to respect and fear them equally.

Thus The Plot Against America shows the shifting roles a father and mother can assume when the family unit is under pressure. During the trauma caused by the Lindbergh presidency, Bess and Herman perform duties that are outside both their own usual realm of influence and the traditional sex roles sanctioned by society. In this fearful time, the most important role Herman has is that of protector to his family, which is a traditionally masculine role. Yet even this role is complicated; Herman is shown as being fallible (he concedes that Bess may have been right when she suggested flight to Canada), and his power within the family peaks and troughs too. The character of Herman conforms to Antony Rowland, Emma Liggins and Eriks Uskalis's assessment of masculinity in contemporary literature as showing “uncertainties and instabilities of their position within the text” and, as an extension, of the father's role in the family.Footnote ⁵⁴ But Bess is similarly transient in her roles, indicating a parental unit that evolves with the situation as a whole, and is not driven solely by the man. Herman's gender identity combines both traditionally masculine and feminine aspects, neither of which is favoured. Herman is forced to renegotiate his masculinity in response to the Lindbergh crisis, with these few years as the only parameters in which Herman exists, and so the reader does not know if the family reverts to traditional sex roles. Nevertheless, in this novel, he represents a masculine identity characterized by flexibility rather than by any allegiance to hegemonic complicity.

Of Roth's male protagonists, Herman seems the most balanced, in terms of both the stability of his personal life with his wife and family, and the ease with which he negotiates his masculine identity. No doubt much of this can be attributed to Roth's fondness for his father and this man's no-nonsense nature in reality, but, this notwithstanding, Herman the character exists in relief to a whole host of more volatile and angst-ridden Roth protagonists, who have much less dangerous circumstances with which to contend. Indeed, through this text, Roth seems to suggest that internal crises of masculine identity are only possible for those in comfortable external circumstances.