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two years pass...
"Goodbye, Columbus" seems like a good one to start with -- it's the thing that launched his career so we know it works for readers who aren't already primed for Roth, and in my view it's a pretty good test for whether you'd like the rest of his 60s output (I guess it's not quite as broadly comic as some of the late 60s stuff like The Great American Novel but that's not what anybody means when they say Philip Roth)
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, 21 February 2021 17:13 (three years ago) link
I'd read a Roth bio in a second. Also I never realized Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry is basically his version of Roth. One of his best, obviously.
― flappy bird, Tuesday, 23 February 2021 19:45 (three years ago) link
I'd recommend Everyman (2006) as a starting point, at least for late Roth (best Roth). It's in the same orbit as the America trilogy, really short, and SO much more bleak.
― flappy bird, Wednesday, 24 February 2021 05:40 (three years ago) link
two months pass...
this is nice to picture
Another time Clarke [neighbor/friend] visited Roth's house, alone, knocking a long time on his door; finally, as she began to leave, he sprang out of the bushes and tackled her.
― johnny crunch, Monday, 26 April 2021 21:58 (two years ago) link
two years pass...
Turturro! Hadn't heard anything about him in a long time, thanks/ Sabbaths Theater ge has a pretty good reputation, I think?
The only dramatization of Roth work I've seen is The Ghost Writer, with Mark Linn Baker as Zuckerman, on ye olde American Playhouse (somehow, the Age of Reagan was very hip for Public TV, at least first term).
I don't know why I didn't mention on WAYR last summer that this, the last Zuckerman novel (2007) has him coming back to NYC a few years after 9/11, trying to swap his boondocks home for the urban apartment of a hot young female writer, whose ex tries to hardsell the Zuck (one of them still has a prostate, dammit) on going in on a book about the long-dead, mostly forgotten Lonoff which will somehow be a success de scandale (Z. somehow knows that this young bull is the spawn of a bigtime Hollywood entertainment attorney and a very Alta California Egyptologist, with a my$tical view---b-but they're only mentioned in passing!) Youngblood's key link is the fabled Amy Bellette, still carrying a torch for Lonoff, but also a brain tumor.
Here's what I did say:
Finished Exit Ghost, which was good enough to be frustrating: I would be following Zuckerman,back and forth, tolerant of his handheld camera/baseball catcher's mask (there's usually a sense of a grid, of wires in the view, but ok; he turns the camera on himself, effectively enough at times), then one of the other characters would get into close-range deposition, spilling their guts in response to his nosy questions---he's the great novelist Zuckerman, and he wants to know! Speaking of xpost rattling machinery: some of this seems good, but there's so much of it---and this is the "real" talk, interspersed with Z.'s increasingly long-ass compulsive fantasy scripting of dialogue with the fabulous WASP literary aspirant, from the loveliest old oil money neighborhood in Houston, which Roth seems to know something about, along with a lot of other things that could have come across a lot better in third-person narration, with characters not having to explain themselves to Zuckerman, which also tends to make good scenes go on too long, as the yadda-yadda format becomes distracting.(Also he sticks in this long okay but uncompelling thing about George Plimpton, who may have died while the book was being written, as happens in the book.)(This while some other promising material is left to become merely anecdotal, although pretty good for that.)
I found Nemesis, which I think is all third person, and looks like there aren't any writers in it, as far as I've skimmed. Will also check Everyman; thanks again for the tip
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― dow, Saturday, 28 October 2023 01:07 (five months ago) link
three months pass...
remains incredible and hilarious that he did not win the nobel
naipaul was (arguably) a bigger asshole
and then . . . dylan? DYLAN? loool
― mookieproof, Friday, 9 February 2024 05:22 (one month ago) link
I don't think there exists a writer X for whom it's incredible X didn't win a nobel prize, there are a lot of great writers and not very many nobel prizes
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Friday, 9 February 2024 16:40 (one month ago) link