Ask me about the work of Philip Roth

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)