Ask me about the work of Philip Roth

also: letting go. this might be one of the most profoundly depressing books i've read. um... that's a comment, not a question. sorry.

(same teacher also picked a class made up entirely of blonds - this was a boy's school btw)

Yes: let's discuss this. I didn't like the ending of AP the first time I read it, but the second time through I thought it worked great.

xpost

Austin: Guston's illustrations are probably the best thing about that book! He and Roth were friends at the time (they both lived in Woodstock for a couple of years; PG encouraged Roth's 'playful', anarchic side--good in theory, didn't make for good books: The Breast, Our Gang, The Great American Novel).

Wait, really? No way!

Um, more on that in a bit.

xpost

Jess: It means you're desperately resentful of being socialized all your life, and really would like to break through everything in a shitstorm of rage, masturbation, pointless alcoholism, and grave-pissing.

All of the 'thou shalt nots', all of the pressures to be a good child, all of the pressures to assimilate (thinking American-Jewish, obvs.), etc. Of course I can't think of any good examples at the moment. Augie March, I guess.

Lauren I'm looking for the Salinger stuff (I think I remember some book I have talking about it), but I'm pretty sure it's basically random.

Which Roth book is Sigorney Weaver reading in The Ice Storm?

and

No fucking idea.

Other thing that weirded me out: I was trying to ask him about the "collaborator" roles in that book, like how he saw them on a spectrum from just villainous to maybe deluded and used, and his answer was more or less "Oh, they're just bad people. They're the bad guys."

I dunno, it's possible he just thought we were all really stupid? (The real amazement of the thing was that after the class, my friend David approached, made friends with, and apparently now occasionally hangs out with Roth.)

Marmot, The Plot Against America's probably a good place to start, yeah. Really gripping, and (naturally) broad in its scope (reaching into American history). It isn't what I'd call a typical Roth book--it veers into 'counterfactual history', but it's not that much of a departure. It's also the only book in which he explores childhood (his own, actually) for an extended amount of pages, which is what makes the book great, I think.

Jhoshea, When She Was Good is mostly 'weird' because Roth is totally (and consciously) writing outside of what he knows. He's a Jewish guy from New Jersey writing about a young Christian girl in the midwest trapped in a totally deterministic world--as if he was trying to be Thomas Wolfe or Sherwood Anderson or something. It's better than most people give it credit for, but it's really not very good, Roth-wise.

also TPAA seemed to have plenty of interesting characters, but only gently interesting. some of the family scenes were pretty exquisitely rendered. as to the collaborators, i mean, they weren't really in any way the center of the book -- what i liked most about the whole way it worked through was the way the "plot" was so much and so little at once, just a step away from what it was and so REALLY just a step away from what it was... the commonplacing of the counterfactual -- seemed like a sideswipe at radical zionist types in the service of rendering the memoiresqe portion more true and vivid -- how it *felt* to be assimilating.

actually, i think one of the things i liked most about the book was its almost worshipful attitude toward FDR - pretty uncool these days, and strangely touching in a hard-to-define way.

I love particularly the last 50-75 pages of that book, from the ridiculous argument with Milton Appel, to the impersonation of the pornographer on the plane, to the GREBT graveyard scene, to the end when he's wandering around the hospital (as a patient), still wanting to be a doctor.

What's great is that the nature of Zuckerman's problem throughout is pretty vague. He's got horrible, chronic pain--from what? He doesn't know. He can't write. Why? He doesn't know. There are lots of reasons given by other characters, but essentially the causes are left unknown. But that doesn't make the pain, or the inability to write, any less real. It makes it MORE maddening in the fact that you don't even know why it's happening. That struck me as a very clever central premise for a book.

Still my favorite Roth is probably Goodbye Columbus and the vintage short story "Defender of the Faith." Tried to read The Ghost Writer back in the early 80s and hurled it @ the wall.

This is, actually, to be found in a lot of Roth books. I think it's Zuckerman who remembers fondly and with nostalgia his parents taking the kids up to a train station to witness FDR's coffin be taken through.

g00blar: thanks for the Ghost Writer recommendation. It's in my Amazon shopping cart, and I'll post back here if I have any questions. I'm currently plodding through a copy of the Master and Margarita with terrible typography though, so that could take a while. Don't disappear in the meantime! This is a great thread!

How does it compare to stuff like Steppenwolf or The Stranger? The wiki makes it sound like a more extreme/depraved version of that kind of thing. Either way, I'll see if I can find it next time I'm in my local used book shop.

Caek, that's great you're gonna read TGW! It's really nothing like Sabbath, but it's fantastic!

Damn. I thought it was somewhere on this thread that someone mentioned that PR actually admitted somewhere (a conference in france maybe?) that Operation Shylock was all made up. I mean, everybody knows it is, but I'm trying to track down Roth's admission. Anyone?

Re: The Ice Storm, IMDB says, 'The book Janey is reading while sitting on the water bed is "When She Was Good" by Philip Roth.'

Did anyone ever think Operation Shylock might NOT have been made up???

(not rhetorical question, I really don't know the history)

i just started the plot against america! yesterday!

The Human Stain is awesome!

I haven't read Everyman, but does he end up realizing that Good Deeds are the only worthwhile pursuit? (like the medieval play)

can anyone point me to the new yorker article referenced above? or give more specific identifiers i could use to search for it?

This just occurred to me after reading that piece about the pot-smoking ex-orthodox-Jew in the New Yorker -- do you think there's a wider theme in contemporary Jewish literature of overly-self-conscious transgression, perhaps having something to do with the combination of guilt, sarcasm and lack of a hell-sized threat of damnation in Jewish culture?

-- A-ron Hubbard (Hurting)

Did anyone ever think Operation Shylock might NOT have been made up???

Nah, no one did, which is sort of the interesting thing.* I mean, everybody knows it's fiction, but if Roth's never said so--if, in fact, he's sworn up and down that it's non-fiction--how, exactly, do we know? Because I have to write about this shit, it feels sort of unconsidered to just write: "Although Operation Shylock is subtitled 'A Confession', and claims to be a true story, c'maaaaaan."

*Mark Shechner, I think, has probably come closest to trying to take PR at his word--he basically ends up saying that at the end of the day it doesn't matter whether the book is a true account or not.

(But I don't really care about all this shit

Just started Ghost Writer. Roth really can turn a sentence around, can't he? Questions to follow.

75 years old today.

I would have thought you'd had enough of him to last a lifetime!

Yeah serious. In some ways, I'll never be free.

the day after Updike turned 76 huh

I read the Zuckerman Bound collection recently. despite upthread dissing The Anatomy lesson was my fav section

If anyone wants to read me blabbing about Roth, this thing, which came out in July I think, is finally online.

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i134/dgoobl/JQImage.jpg

Roth to publish new novel this autumn, another novel next year.

“The Humbling,” which is scheduled for the fall, is a novel about an aging stage actor whose empty life is altered by “a counterplot of unusual erotic desire,” the publisher said. The company (which awarded its Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship to “Goodbye, Columbus” in 1959) will also release “Nemesis,” a work of fiction by Mr. Roth, above. Set in the summer of 1944, it tells of a polio epidemic and its effects on a closely knit Newark community and its children. That book is scheduled for publication in 2010.

tbh that description sounds like a Philip Roth madlib e.g. coming winter 2009 Philip Roth's "Words Like Arrows" interlaces the story of Daniel Lampel a blah blah blah In 1950s Weequahic blah blah blah overweening mother blah blah blah fictional small-town college blah blah blah parallels to current political situations blah blah blah

still excited though. i thought indignation was good, though hard not to compare with everyman just because of length and setting etc.

How often do you read Roth? I've read eight-and-a-bit of his now. I feel a bit exhausted at the end of each one, so have to go through a good long rest period before trying him again. So while I think I'd be pretty happy to read no other authors ever again, I don't actually think it would raise my Roth rate very much

i think i read the few zuckermans i've gone through in fairly quick succession, but then they start fairly easily. a couple of his are more pageturning than others - the plot against america - but then i know i probably waited a while after the human stain. i'm a little sketchy on my tally of how many i've read because i've set aside a bunch half way through - my life as a man, portnoy, the third? zuckerman book with the zionism and the illness (so glad when i found out that other people couldn't motivate themselves to plough through it either). some of it's psychologically dense enough to feel like you need a rest, for sure.

although unlike shipley and jordan and dom i have actually met whiney g weingarten in person for approx 45 seconds

haw wrong thread!@!

How often do you read Roth? I've read eight-and-a-bit of his now. I feel a bit exhausted at the end of each one, so have to go through a good long rest period before trying him again. So while I think I'd be pretty happy to read no other authors ever again, I don't actually think it would raise my Roth rate very much

I'm obviously not a normal case, as I read little other than Roth for 4+ years (ok, I had to read a bunch of other stuff, but I had to *always* be reading/thinking about/writing on Roth). I don't feel exhausted at the end of a Roth book, no--although above, I think Laurel(?) said she thought his endings are weird, they tend to leave me exhilarated more than anything else. I guess I can understand that, if you were not a fan of his voice, the books could be exhausting, because that voice is so insistent, so persistent, that you'd just say 'enough already'. But I love his authorial voice, and I can open pretty much any of his books feel pretty much total trust in where that voice might take me.

i really enjoyed that piece you linked, it's really insightful!!!

Thanks a lot!

I got Exit Ghost in hardback for £1 today (Union Street Poundland, all you Glasgowers - and perhaps other Poundlands across the country). I haven't read anything else by him though I've been meaning to, so 1. can I read this without reading the other Zuckerman books? and 2. if I can, is it a good idea?

if i'm in the toon this week I'll definitely be going to the Poundland.

Interesting fact: Philip Roth writes a lot about dick, and Philip Dick writes a lot about wrath.

1. yes
2. no, cause he wrote much better books than exit ghost

this, basically^

Exit Ghost has some good bits, and it's a great idea of a book, but Roth didn't do as much as he should of with the set-up, I thought. It wasn't funny enough, for one. (And what was with the ten pages out of nowhere on Plimpton?) It's by no means a bad book, though; Roth writes circles around most other authors so there's always pleasure to be found in his books (for me, at least).

Just picked up Zuckerman Bound secondhand. The Ghost Writer's a lovely, concise, subtle piece of work. Zuckerman Unbound is wildly solipsistic but funny and odd, especially the scenes with Alvin Pepler. The Anatomy Lesson seems to me completely pointless and rudderless but like G00blar says, there's pleasure to be found along the way. I'm hoping The Prague Orgy turns things around a bit. Reading The Anatomy Lesson, there's no way you'd predict the later Zuckerman masterpieces. Zuckerman (and by extension Roth) is so much better when he's observing and recording someone else's story rather than writing about himself, I think, although I haven't read The Counterlife or Exit Ghost yet.

Love this thread by the way G00blar. Perfect companion to my current Roth binge.

Nice! Yeah, you should continue with the Prague Orgy and The Counterlife, the latter of which will give you ample time to compare Zuckerman writing about himself and writing about others. It's an astounding piece of work, Roth operating on all cylinders.

(And what was with the ten pages out of nowhere on Plimpton?)

I'm assuming Roth wrote them from the heart.

I recently ploughed through Operation Shylock and am nearing the end of The Counterlife. Both books feature extended sequences in Israel that start off plausibly enough, before descending to a greater or lesser extent into something less like farce and more like an extended Jewish in-joke. My question is: what is the goyische reader supposed to take from these bits?

I enjoyed this Roth interview in today's Times. It doesn't go into great depth, but I liked the bits about his method.

He seems agreeably free of pretension, interested above all in good stories - which makes my question more of a puzzle to me, really. I love nabisco's story upthread about the mother in The Plot Against America, it's a little hard to reconcile that with the in-jokes and self-referencey bits that have plagues the ones I've read recently.

"If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/26/philip-roth-novel-minority-cult

discuss

Oi! My question first.

i read the human stain in under 2 weeks because i wanted it to be over

whats ur opinion of the assfucking scene in the humbling

just read the humbling ... not very good? i dunno, the beginning had potential, but the relationship with Pegeen was uhhhh. And I've liked these last few shorter novels, Indignation, Exit Ghost, Everyman, etc. But this one just seemed pointless.

what do we think of The Ghost Writer? Just finished. Not sure I want any more Zuckerman.

if i pick up patrimony as something to just zip through on autopilot will i enjoy it? i heard good things a while ago and my interest is piqued, never having read any of his autobio stuff, and despite having a few of the bigger novels still waiting (eg Sabbath's)

Patrimony is better than many of his novels.

I'm trying to think if I've read any better delineations of the father-son relationship.

i wonder if i might've read you enthusing about it here before. it's been a while since i've read one of the novels, really, so am ready for something. thanks for the rec.

I'm sure I have!

Just finished I Married a Communist, and American Pastoral before that. And of course I'll go ahead and read Human Stain next, just to finish up the trio. I actually really enjoyed Communist, even though it garners no mention in this thread other than g00blar saying it's the worst of the Zuckermans!

I Married A Communist includes a reference to two gangsters named Big Pussy and Little Pussy, a year before The Sopranos began.

i used to feel like american pastoral was the best book i ever read. now i rate a couple things above it, but it's still in my top 5 of all time.

I've twice tried I Married A Communist and given up in boredom within fifty pages or so. It's very odd, I've never remotely had that problem with any of his other stuff.

I love I Married a Communist. No way the worst of the Zuckermans. Better than The Human Stain, The Anatomy Lesson and The Prague Orgy for starters. Maybe it's just because I'm fascinated by the Red Scare but I couldn't see why it was so disliked.

Recently read Nemesis, which I adored - his best since American Pastoral imo. Would rather read about wartime New Jersey than horny old writers any day.

Re: Ismael's 2009 question, my Jewish grandfather lived in Israel and I've been there a couple of times so the themes in The Counterlife resonated with me even though it's mostly huge chunks of debate crowbarred into the mouths of thinly drawn characters. What really struck (and depressed) me was how little the debate has changed since he wrote it.

One for Barthes, Alfred and anyone else who's down on authorial intent.

My interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia.html

Damn.

If you haven't read the Human Stain Roth's letter contains a shitload of spoilers BTW. Fascinating if you have though - I always thought the "spooks" misunderstanding was a weak premise - I didn't realise it was true.

Comments
1 comment |

PHILIP! GET OUT OF THE HOUSE MORE! YOU'VE BEEN ISOLATED IN THE COUNTRY FOR TOO LONG!!!! GO GET LAID!!!!
Posted 9/7/2012, 1:04:00pm by comancheria

Good to read something new from Roth. He was at a pace of a novella per year in the late 2000s. I was wondering if he was still writing.

There's been a response:

http://quominus.org/archives/979

http://quominus.org/archives/981

Good to read something new from Roth. He was at a pace of a novella per year in the late 2000s. I was wondering if he was still writing.

― Earth, Wind & Fire & Alabama (Eazy), Friday, September 7, 2012 7:17 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

???

does gooblar still post under some name? i saw his book in the library

What book's this? Would read.

g00blar, d4v1d. the major phases of philip roth (london: continuum, 2011)

It'd better answer my 2009 question.

i read the human stain in under 2 weeks because i wanted it to be over

― harbl, Thursday, 12 November 2009 17:56 (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wtf

ruh roh

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/09/philip_roth_im_done/

Philip Roth is calling it a career.

In an interview with a French publication called Les inRocks last month — which does not appear to have been reported in the United States — Roth, 78, said he has not written anything new in the last three years, and that he will not write another novel.

“To tell you the truth, I’m done,” Roth told the magazine, in the most definitive statement he has ever made about his future plans. “‘Nemesis’ will be my last book.”

(The interview is published in French; we used an Internet program to translate his quotes into English. We asked his publisher, Houghton Mifflin, for confirmation. They reached out to Roth this morning. “He said it was true,” said Lori Glazer, vice president and executive director of publicity.)

Roth said that at 74, realizing he was running out of years, he reread all his favorite novels, and then reread all his books in reverse chronological order. “I wanted to see if I had wasted my time writing,” he said. “And I thought it was rather successful. At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said: “I did the best I could with what I had.” This is exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had.

“And after that, I decided that I was done with fiction. I do not want to read, to write more,” he said. “I have dedicated my life to the novel: I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life.”

as much as it it's a shame, cause a weaker Roth is still better than most writers, i don't think he can reinvent himself again to write a really great book. especially due to the fact that there is some truth to the claim that he writes the same novel again and again.

I have very little time for Roth's writing but I really respect this as an artistic decision (and not just because fewer new roth books might mean fewer longfrm pieces about how Important he is).

I have never objected when an artist announces retirement: it takes courage.

p.s this things should be taken with a grain of salt of course.
a person who wrote all his life, and books WERE his life, might say one thing, and do something else..

If true, I'm glad he bowed out with Nemesis rather than The Humbling.

if true, does it mean he definitely wont win the nobel prize now?

Well, I doubt the Nobel committee would have The Humbling and Exit Ghost in mind when honoring him.

I had a little think about the most fitting way to pour one out, then decided it's probably best not to bother.

exit ghost is rad
this is like justin timberlake all over again

lol ismael

i really hope he circumvents this by just writing loads of non-fiction shit instead

as long as he wont "circumvents this by just writing loads of non-fiction shit instead"

an Autobiography would be nice though!

I wouldn't mind another Patrimony. Does he have another dying relative he can write about?

himself?

too bad he already used the title The Dying Animal.

One of my favorite second winds. Still, what is the point of retiring publicly? Just don't write something. And then if you write something, no big deal.

i guess it's so that everyone will leave you alone for a while

everybody, leave Philip Roth ALONE

Leave him alone on his mountain in upstate New York!

By coincidence Gooblar's book arrived at my house this week. It's so beautifully bubblewrapped, I haven't dared open it.

Still, what is the point of retiring publicly?
Well, I guess if you get questions about it in an interview, you might as well say it? It's not like he issued a press release.
Didn't he a year or two ago say he'd stopped reading novels too? Some rubbish about how he "wised up", iirc. Not too long before that, he talked about how he was rereading all those old favorites that he'd not read in years.

Uh, anyways, _Nemesis_ was a good 'un. Is this the point where we should start coming up with dumbass interpretations of it? Polio represents fiction and the Newark community is Philip Roth, and Cantor is, uh, "Philip Roth" the author. Ahem, yeah, I'm no lit major obv.

I wonder what goes on in an aging, famous author's head. Could totally understand worrying about some asshole publishing the shit you're just messing around with at the moment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/books/struggle-over-philip-roth-reflects-on-putting-down-his-pen.html?hp&_r=0

the idea of writing standing up (i think hemingway said he did it, too?) is bizarre to me, but i'm not getting much done these days sitting down so maybe i should try it.

not quite as bizarre as richard powers's admission that he wrote whole novels in bed, but i think if i tried that i'd just nap a lot.

Roth seems pretty happy with life, I can't begrudge him his retirement.

http://www.historycommons.org/events-images/a589_rumsfeld_approves_memo_2050081722-7306.jpg

like the article says, he had a better run in the last 15 years of his career than most writers get at any time, so yeah, enjoy playing with yr iphone phil, you earned it.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/philip-roth-eightieth-birthday-celebration.html?mbid=social_retweet

i think the doc is available here, though it seems 2 say 'technical difficulties when i try to play it just now

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/philip-roth/film-philip-roth-unmasked/2467/

it's v good, as one of the co-directors mentions, it's mostly just roth talking abt his books, etc, which i cld prob listen 2 for 10 hrs tbh

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/philip-roth/film-comment-william-karel-co-writer-co-director/2565/

also roth's own reaction to the doc

AM: What did Roth think about the final cut?

WK: When we sent him the finished film, we were anxious to know what his reaction would be. He replied to us with this delightful note:

I just finished watching it through. It’s very sad, really, isn’t it? But it’s well done and you all should be congratulated for your infinite patience and hard work and tact and taste and intelligence. I think it’s a fair and accurate portrait of this guy, and I have no complaints. And Mia is gorgeous, even if she isn’t allowed to tell all of mankind what a sweetheart I am. I thank you, Livia, and William, my shaggy-bearded Mickey Sabbath look-a-like, for doing an honorable and honest job. I gave the last interview of my life to the New York Times yesterday, about my retirement, which should result in a long story in the paper before the week is out, and I made certain to tell them about the program and when it will be aired. The struggle with writing is over. Hallelujah. I’m a free man. Free at last.
–Philip Roth

NIXON: Roth is a bad man. He’s a horrible moral leper.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/nixon-asked-haldeman-philip-roth

Funny. I'm reading the forced, confused When She Was Good.

can the next thread about gender issues also be titled "ask me about the work of philip roth"

That’s a blurb that would sell books: “‘well written but sickeningly filthy’ — H. R. Haldeman.”

I recently accused a writer of a particularly bad Tablet Mag piece of "masturbating into a piece of liver"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/books/review/my-life-as-a-writer.html?src=me&ref=general

He comes across as a self important bore in that interview. Still, I definitely agree that measuring a literary work against some prefab ideological framework is not just boring but also isn't "reading" in the highest sense of the word. He makes this argument in a sort of self-serving way and with little awareness or sympathy for the reasons people feel compelled to call out instances where they feel a writer is perpetuating corrosive attitudes though, so fuck him.

i read Indignation recently after seeing the trailer for the movie. I couldn't make heads or tails what the thing was about, so I read it on a plane and enjoyed it quite a bit. Quick read. Saw that there's an American Pastoral movie coming out in October, bit of a longer book, thoughts on that one?