“If you’re from New Jersey,” Nathan Zuckerman says in The Counterlife, “and you write thirty books, and you win the Nobel Prize, and you live to be white-haired and ninety-five, it’s highly unlikely but not impossible that after your death they’ll decide to name a rest stop for you on the Jersey Turnpike. ... For a New Jersey novelist that’s as much immortality as it’s realistic to hope for.” There is not, as yet, a Philip Roth rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike (they could always replace Joyce Kilmer), but the prospect no longer seems far-fetched, and the plausibility of such a beatification speaks volumes about the fate of Roth’s reputation. A writer who, in the first part of his career, seemed defined by transgression—against Jewish self-esteem, against sexual decency, against the conventions of fiction—has been transformed, over the last fifteen years, into an official American classic. The fate that Zuckerman mocked has befallen his creator: Roth, the rebellious son, the fleshliest of writers, is turning into a monument before our eyes.

Claudia Roth Pierpont’s book is both a history of this process and a contribution to it. By addressing Roth’s books in chronological order, from Goodbye, Columbus in 1959 to Nemesis in 2010, Pierpont allows the reader to see how the scandal that greeted Roth’s early work started to give way, in the 1990s, to reverence. Already in 1971, when he published the Nixon satire Our Gang, Roth was famous enough to be taken note of in the Oval Office. Pierpont quotes the sinister conversation that Nixon and Haldeman had about the book: “A lot of this can be turned to our advantage. ... I think the anti-Semitic thing can be, I hate to say it, but it can be very helpful to us,” the president muses, to which his chief of staff adds, “There are a lot more anti-Semites than there are Jews, and the anti-Semites are with us generally and the Jews aren’t.”

But times and parties changed, and in 1998 Bill Clinton gave Roth a medal, and in 2011 Barack Obama gave him another medal. In the intervening years, he won just about all the major literary prizes on the planet, some of them more than once—with the exception of the Nobel Prize, which seems destined never to be given again to an American writer, even the most deserving. (When Roth turned eighty in 2013, the celebrations seemed like an almost conscious act of reparation for the missing prize.) Most significantly of all, Roth became one of a handful of living writers to be published in the Library of America. Even if you think that the Library of America ought to wait for posterity’s judgment about the writers of our time and not rush to marmorealize all their books as classics, it is hard to protest Roth’s appearance on this particular shelf. How can the history of twentieth-century American literature be written without him?

But then, how will a historian be able to convey the shock and—to use a very Rothian word—the indignation that this abundantly belaureled novelist once caused? The first sentence of Pierpont’s first chapter is “What is being done to silence this man?”: it was the question asked by a rabbi in a letter to the Anti-Defamation League after the publication of Goodbye, Columbus. The New York Times editorialized against the “revolting sex excesses” of Portnoy’s Complaint. Later, as Pierpont shows, feminists took up the burden of complaint from Jews: Vivian Gornick inveighed against the “unacknowledged misogyny” and “dehumanizing vileness” of My Life as a Man. And Roth himself fired back: at the Jews in the figure of the sanctimonious Judge Wapter, in The Ghost Writer, at the feminists in the figure of Delphine Roux, the professor who brings down Coleman Silk in The Human Stain.

Pierpont, who is a friend of Roth’s and a pre-publication reader of his work, does not skirt these arguments, but she does not allow them to worry her. She approvingly quotes Roth’s explanation that to portray individual Jews as absurd or flawed—like the complacent Patimkins in Goodbye, Columbus or the overbearing, stool-examining Sophie Portnoy—does not constitute stereotyping a whole group: “He noted that people read Anna Karenina without concluding that adultery was a Russian trait; Madame Bovarydid not lead readers to condemn the morals of French provincial women en masse. He was writing literature, not sociology or—Bellow’s helpful phrase—public relations.” Later, when it comes to the issue of Roth’s “misogyny,” Pierpont is equally absolving: “He considers himself a man who loves women, and he counts many women among his close and lifelong friends. ... His books contain an immense variety of female characters, of every moral and emotional persuasion. And they are no more ‘good’ or ‘bad’ than his male characters. ... His work was being misread by some contemporary feminists as it had once been misread by Jews—and for reasons not so very different, involving the depiction of flawed or comically conceived characters.”