― acid waffle house (dubplatestyle), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 17:30 (seventeen years ago) link
― A-ron Hubbard (Hurting), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 17:31 (seventeen years ago) link
― lauren (laurenp), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 17:32 (seventeen years ago) link
― caek (caek), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 17:33 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― g00blar (gooblar), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 17:34 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― g00blar (gooblar), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 17:36 (seventeen years ago) link
― lauren (laurenp), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 17:38 (seventeen years ago) link
Which Roth book is Sigorney Weaver reading in The Ice Storm?
― caek (caek), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 17:42 (seventeen years ago) link
― lauren (laurenp), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 17:44 (seventeen years ago) link
and
No fucking idea.
― g00blar (gooblar), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 17:44 (seventeen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 17:45 (seventeen years ago) link
― g00blar (gooblar), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 17:47 (seventeen years ago) link
― i am not a nugget (stevie), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 19:41 (seventeen years ago) link
― tokyo nursery school: afternoon session (rosemary), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 21:59 (seventeen years ago) link
― milo z (mlp), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 22:01 (seventeen years ago) link
― Eazy (Eazy), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 22:09 (seventeen years ago) link
― Mr. Que (Mr.Que), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 22:10 (seventeen years ago) link
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.)
― nabisco (nabisco), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 23:34 (seventeen years ago) link
― Marmot (marmotwolof), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 23:50 (seventeen years ago) link
― jhoshea (scoopsnoodle), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 00:04 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― g00blar (gooblar), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 00:34 (seventeen years ago) link
― g00blar (gooblar), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 00:37 (seventeen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 01:53 (seventeen years ago) link
― Marmot (marmotwolof), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 01:56 (seventeen years ago) link
― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 01:59 (seventeen years ago) link
― pinkmoose (jacklove), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 04:07 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 04:11 (seventeen years ago) link
― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 04:13 (seventeen years ago) link
― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 04:14 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 09:01 (seventeen years ago) link
― g00blar (gooblar), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 10:37 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― g00blar (gooblar), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 10:46 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― m coleman (lovebug starski), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 11:37 (seventeen years ago) link
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 (gooblar), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 12:42 (seventeen years ago) link
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!
― caek (caek), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 22:45 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― Marmot (marmotwolof), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 22:58 (seventeen years ago) link
Caek, that's great you're gonna read TGW! It's really nothing like Sabbath, but it's fantastic!
― g00blar (gooblar), Wednesday, 24 January 2007 23:39 (seventeen years ago) link
― G00blar, Wednesday, 28 February 2007 10:07 (seventeen years ago) link
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?
― G00blar, Tuesday, 31 July 2007 14:22 (sixteen years ago) link
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.'
― caek, Sunday, 5 August 2007 11:47 (sixteen years ago) link
Did anyone ever think Operation Shylock might NOT have been made up???
― Hurting 2, Sunday, 5 August 2007 17:54 (sixteen years ago) link
(not rhetorical question, I really don't know the history)
― Hurting 2, Sunday, 5 August 2007 17:55 (sixteen years ago) link
i just started the plot against america! yesterday!
― s1ocki, Sunday, 5 August 2007 17:59 (sixteen years ago) link
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)
― poortheatre, Sunday, 5 August 2007 18:16 (sixteen years ago) link
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)
― W i l l, Sunday, 5 August 2007 19:49 (sixteen years ago) link
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
― G00blar, Sunday, 5 August 2007 22:33 (sixteen years ago) link
Just started Ghost Writer. Roth really can turn a sentence around, can't he? Questions to follow.
― caek, Wednesday, 17 October 2007 08:45 (sixteen years ago) link
75 years old today.
― G00blar, Wednesday, 19 March 2008 09:42 (sixteen years ago) link
I would have thought you'd had enough of him to last a lifetime!
― Masonic Boom, Wednesday, 19 March 2008 09:47 (sixteen years ago) link
everybody, leave Philip Roth ALONE
― but the boo boyz are getting to (Z S), Friday, 9 November 2012 19:45 (eleven years ago) link
Leave him alone on his mountain in upstate New York!
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 9 November 2012 19:47 (eleven years ago) link
By coincidence Gooblar's book arrived at my house this week. It's so beautifully bubblewrapped, I haven't dared open it.
― Ismael Klata, Friday, 9 November 2012 20:03 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Øystein, Friday, 9 November 2012 21:23 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/books/struggle-over-philip-roth-reflects-on-putting-down-his-pen.html?hp&_r=0
― johnny crunch, Sunday, 18 November 2012 15:42 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― THAT IS ONE BIG PIZZA (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Sunday, 18 November 2012 16:05 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― THAT IS ONE BIG PIZZA (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Sunday, 18 November 2012 16:06 (eleven years ago) link
Roth seems pretty happy with life, I can't begrudge him his retirement.
― Ismael Klata, Sunday, 18 November 2012 16:10 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.historycommons.org/events-images/a589_rumsfeld_approves_memo_2050081722-7306.jpg
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 18 November 2012 16:12 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― THAT IS ONE BIG PIZZA (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Sunday, 18 November 2012 16:13 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/philip-roth-eightieth-birthday-celebration.html?mbid=social_retweet
― your fretless ways (Eazy), Thursday, 21 March 2013 14:28 (eleven years ago) link
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/
― johnny crunch, Tuesday, 2 April 2013 15:07 (eleven years ago) link
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
― What is wrong with songs? Absolutely nothing. Songs are great. (DL), Thursday, 30 January 2014 21:22 (ten years ago) link
Funny. I'm reading the forced, confused When She Was Good.
― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 30 January 2014 21:32 (ten years ago) link
can the next thread about gender issues also be titled "ask me about the work of philip roth"
― mustread guy (schlump), Thursday, 30 January 2014 22:48 (ten years ago) link
That’s a blurb that would sell books: “‘well written but sickeningly filthy’ — H. R. Haldeman.”
― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 30 January 2014 22:53 (ten years ago) link
I recently accused a writer of a particularly bad Tablet Mag piece of "masturbating into a piece of liver"
― Burt Stuntin (Hurting 2), Thursday, 30 January 2014 23:08 (ten years ago) link
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/books/review/my-life-as-a-writer.html?src=me&ref=general
― johnny crunch, Tuesday, 4 March 2014 03:56 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 4 March 2014 04:09 (ten years ago) link
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?
― flappy bird, Friday, 12 August 2016 17:37 (seven years ago) link