Ask me about the work of Philip Roth

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

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?