Roth: 'I have no desire to write fiction'

Cynthia Haven interviews the American novelist Philip Roth

Philip Roth

From Cynthia Haven (Stanford Report):

Cynthia Haven: You told Tina Brown in 2009, "I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life." Yet, in 2012, you said emphatically that you were done with fiction. We can't bring ourselves to believe you've completely stopped writing. Do you really think your talent will let you quit?

Philip Roth: Well, you better believe me, because I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

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• Philip Roth on reading fiction
• Roth and the fate of the Great American Novel
• Philip Roth: The Authorised Biography

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

A new biography by Claudia Roth Pierpont

Philip Roth. Photo: Francois Reumont

From Linda Grant (The Independent):

The curse of the novelist is the question ‘Is it autobiographical?’ Is writing down of the events of one’s own life considered to be more authentic than the exercise of the imagination? Philip Roth must have been plagued more than any other writer with this dumbest of demands. For he writes out of his native Newark, sends his characters to his own high school, makes novelists his narrators, and calls one of his characters Philip Roth. After his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, wrote a tell-all memoir of their marriage, he wrote an answering novel, in which an actress writes a memoir of her failed marriage to a radio star.

Sooner or later there will be a biography. James Atlas has already crawled all over Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz and we are bound to hear the laments of Roth’s many ex-girlfriends and perhaps the children of his first wife, as well as friends and editors. Yet a new book, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, by Claudia Roth Pierpont (no relation, literary Roths are legion – Joseph, Henry, Philip) binds the books to the man not by mining them for nuggets of autobiographical information but by talking to Roth himself about what he put into them, by which she doesn’t mean the facts, but the territory of imagination and self that creates fiction.

Pierpont met Roth in 2002. A couple of years later she received a letter from him responding to a New Yorker article she had written. Roth, it turns out, has a habit of writing to the authors of writing he admires. This impulse led fortuitously to a series of meetings and eventually the idea for a book which began after he had completed Nemesis and announced his retirement. It has grown out of conversations with him and research in his personal files in the attic of his Connecticut house. Unlike a biographer, she has not interviewed other sources. Like a critic, she has made her own judgements about the work. What emerges is his charm – he has certainly charmed her. “He loves to listen: he’s as funny as you might think from his books, but he makes the people around him feel funny too – he may be the easiest laugher I’ve ever met.” [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

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• Writers: Philip Roth
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• Television Interview with Philip Roth (2010)

Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth

A new title from Bloomsbury

Claudia Franziska Bruhwiler, Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth

From Bloomsbury:

Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth exemplifies how literature and, specifically, the work of Philip Roth can help readers understand the ways in which individuals develop their political identity, learn to comprehend political ideas, and define their role in society. Combining political science, literary theory, and anthropology, the book describes an individual's political coming of age as a political initiation story, which is crafted as much by the individual himself as by the circumstances influencing him, such as political events or the political attitude of the parents.

Philip Roth's characters constantly re-write their own stories and experiment with their identities. Accordingly, Philip Roth's works enable the reader to explore, for instance, how individuals construct their identity against the backdrop of political transformations or contested territories, and thereby become initiands—or fail to do so. Contrary to what one might expect, initiations are not only defining moments in childhood and early adulthood; instead, Roth shows how initiation processes recur throughout an individual's life. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth
• The PEN/Allen Foundation: Philip Roth
• Philip Roth wins Man Booker International prize
• Philip Roth: Man Booker International Interview
• Roth and Oates receive 2010 National Humanities Medals
• Philip Roth on reading fiction

Bret Easton Ellis talks to Matthew Specktor

An interview for Salon.com

Bret Easton Ellis (left) and Matthew Specktor (right)

From Salon.com:

Matthew Specktor and Bret Easton Ellis have known one another for 20 years. Neither of them can remember how they met. “I think it was at the Bowery Bar in New York,” Specktor says. “But that could just be a mathematical probability.”

Approximate generational peers, Ellis grew up in Sherman Oaks, Specktor in Santa Monica. These were two different versions of the same city. On a recent Friday night they sat down at the Polo Lounge, a Beverly Hills landmark that seemed as good a place as any for the two writers to drink martinis (Hendricks gin, with cucumbers) and talk about Los Angeles, writing, Twitter and Specktor’s new book, “American Dream Machine.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Bret Easton Ellis talks to NUVO Magazine
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• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho
• Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero

The PEN/Allen Foundation: Philip Roth

Roth accepts the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award

From Youtube: ‘The PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award honors a writer whose critically acclaimed work has drawn a wide audience and helps us to understand the human condition in original and powerful ways. The 2013 recipient of the award was Philip Roth.’ [Read More]

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• Writers: Philip Roth
• Philip Roth wins Man Booker International prize
• Philip Roth: Man Booker International Interview
• Roth and Oates receive 2010 National Humanities Medals
• Philip Roth on reading fiction

Philip Roth's 80th Birthday Celebrations

The New Yorker's David Remnick reflects on the proceedings

Philip Roth

David Remnick (New Yorker): ‘I saw and heard something remarkable just a few hours ago, something I’m not likely to forget until all the mechanisms of remembering are shot and I’m tucked away for good. Philip Roth celebrated his eightieth birthday in the Billy Johnson Auditorium of the Newark Museum last night with the most astonishing literary performance I’ve ever witnessed. On his birthday night, and having sworn never again to give himself over to the “stringent exigencies of literature,” he put on a farewell performance, a great burst of writing and sly self-display—a triumphal lope around the bases, like Ted Williams did on his last day in a Red Sox uniform.’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth
• Is Philip Roth Retiring?
• Philip Roth talks to Kirsty Wark (2011)
• Philip Roth: The Authorised Biography
• Philip Roth writes to Wikipedia
• Philip Roth on Ageing
• Philip Roth's Nemeses: Short Novels
• Philip Roth Desktop Wallpapers

Is Philip Roth Retiring?

American writer tells French magazine that Nemesis (2010) would be his final novel

Philip Roth reading at home

Ben Quinn (The Guardian) (thanks to Jan Wilm for the link):

Philip Roth, the US novelist widely regarded as America's best hope of ending a 20 year drought without a winner of the Nobel prize for literature, has said that he is calling it a day.

The writer announced his retirement in a little-noticed interview with a French magazine and said that Nemesis, which was published in 2010, would be his last book.

"To tell you the truth, I'm done," Roth told Les Inrocks last month, adding that he had not written anything for the past three years.

Having reached the age of 74, he realised that he was running out of years and had chosen to reread his favourite novels, as well as his own books. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth
• Philip Roth talks to Kirsty Wark (2011)
• Philip Roth: The Authorised Biography
• Philip Roth writes to Wikipedia
• Philip Roth on Ageing
• Philip Roth's Nemeses: Short Novels
• Philip Roth Desktop Wallpapers

Philip Roth talks to Kirsty Wark (2011)

Roth appears on The Book Review Show (BBC)

Philip Roth talks to Kirsty Wark about writing, relationships, ageing and death. [Source]

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• Writers: Philip Roth
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• Philip Roth writes to Wikipedia
• Philip Roth on Ageing
• Philip Roth's Nemeses: Short Novels
• Philip Roth Desktop Wallpapers

First Author Photographs of Famous Writers

Flavorwire compiles a list of their favourite dust jacket photographs

Emily Temple (Flavorwire): 'Authors have to be pretty careful about the photos they choose to have on their dust jackets. Not only is it remarkably easy to fall prey to one of those pesky author photo clichés, but those first baby-faced pictures that grace debut novels might just go down in history — if they’re lucky. To that end, we scoured the web to pull together a few surprising, intense, and charmingly youthful author photos from some of our very favorite authors’ first works' [Read More]

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• Faber & Faber Writers' Gallery
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• Writers: Philip Roth

Philip Roth: The Authorised Biography

W. W. Norton & Company to publish first official Roth biography

Philip Roth. Watercolour by J. C. Phillips

From the New York Times (28 September 2012): 'W.W. Norton & Company will publish the previously announced authorized biography of Philip Roth, the press announced on Thursday.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth

Philip Roth writes to Wikipedia

Writer publishes letter in New Yorker to produce 'secondary source'

Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk in The Human Stain (dir. Robert Benton, 2003)

From the New Yorker:

Dear Wikipedia,

I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel “The Human Stain.” The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like to ask to have removed. This item entered Wikipedia not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip—there is no truth in it at all.

Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, 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.” Thus was created the occasion for this open letter. After failing to get a change made through the usual channels, I don’t know how else to proceed.

My novel “The Human Stain” was described in the entry as “allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.” (The precise language has since been altered by Wikipedia’s collaborative editing, but this falsity still stands.)

This alleged allegation is in no way substantiated by fact. “The Human Stain” was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years. One day in the fall of 1985, while Mel, who was meticulous in all things large and small, was meticulously taking the roll in a sociology class, he noted that two of his students had as yet not attended a single class session or attempted to meet with him to explain their failure to appear, though it was by then the middle of the semester. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth
• Where to start with Philip Roth?
• The Later Work of Philip Roth
• Roth on the fate of the Great American Novel
• Philip Roth: In his own words
• Philip Roth on Ageing

Bernard Avishai on Portnoy's Complaint

Avishai attempts to identify the object of Roth's American satire

Philip Roth

From The Daily Beast: 'Philip Roth’s Alex Portnoy is the satirist par excellence. He’s awfully clever, making us laugh out loud. But who is Portnoy mocking exactly? The bourgeois family? Psychoanalysis? Himself? Bernard Avishai, author of Promiscuous: ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness, talks to Roth himself to come up with the real object of Portnoy’s critique of America.' [Read More]

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Philip Roth awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize

American writer receives prestigious Spanish literary award

From The Olive Press: 'US author Philip Roth has won one of Spain’s top literary awards after being praised for his "fluid, incisive writing".' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth

David Denby on Fyodor Dostoyevsky

'Can Dostoevsky still kick you in the gut?'

Source

David Denby writes about Fyodor Dostoyevsky for The New Yorker blog Page Turner:

Many people would say that Dostoevsky’s short novel “Notes from Underground” marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature. (Other candidates: Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew,” written in the seventeen-sixties but not widely read until the eighteen-twenties, and, of course, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” from 1856.) Certainly, Nietzsche’s writings, Freud’s theory of neurosis, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Bellow’s “Herzog,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” perhaps Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” and half of Woody Allen’s work wouldn’t have been the same without the existence of this ornery, unstable, unmanageable text—the fictional confession of a spiteful modern Hamlet, an inhabitant of St. Petersburg, “that most abstract and pre-meditated city,” and a man unable to act and also unable to stop humiliating himself and embarrassing others. A self-regarding, truculent, miserable, paralyzed man. As I began reading “Notes” again recently (in Andrew R. MacAndrew’s translation for Signet Classics), I wondered if it had been overwhelmed by the books and movies that it has influenced. I wondered if “Notes” would seem like a dim echo, whether it still had the shock value that I remember from long ago. [Read More]

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Christopher Hitchens on James Joyce's Ulysses

Written for the 100th Bloomsday in 2004

In a June 1994 article for Vanity Fair, the late Christopher Hitchens reflects on James Joyce's classic modernist novel, Ulysses, in celebration of its centenary (link via Times Flow Stemmed): 'A surly English overseer is standing at the entrance to a construction site in London. It’s a filthy, wet day. He sees approaching him a shabby figure, with clay pipe clenched in mouth and a battered raincoat, and scowlingly thinks, Another effing Mick on the scrounge. The Irishman shambles up to him and asks if there’s any casual job going. “You don’t look to me,” says the supervisor, “as if you know the difference between a girder and a joist.” “I do, too,” says the Irishman indignantly. “The first of them wrote Faust and the second one wrote Ulysses.”' [Read More]

Documentary: Philip Roth Without Complexes

New documentary film to be broadcast

Philip Roth. Photograph: AP Photo/Douglas Healey

Philip Roth Without Complexes, a 'rare and moving documentary' on the American writer, is to be screened today on the French-German channel Arte:

Based on eight hours of interviews, the hour-long film "Philip Roth Without Complexes" was shot a year ago between the 78-year-old writer's Upper East side apartment and his forest lodge in Connecticut.

Roth describes how he writes standing up after finding it freed his mind to "walk around", building his characters for "a year, or two or three" until a book takes shape -- then mailing it off to a small group of friends, the actress Mia Farrow among them.

Tackling one of the labels often attached to him, Roth tells the film's director William Karel and journalist Livia Manera he is "not crazy about being described as a Jewish-American writer. I don't write Jewish, I write American."

But whether it is his Jewish upbringing or his home town of Newark, where many of his works are set, Roth says it was a turning point when he realised he could use his own world as raw material.

"You can't invent out of nothing, or I can't certainly," he said. "I need some reality, to rub two sticks of reality together to get a fire of reality."

After his first short story was published - "about some Jewish guys in the army" - he was "assailed as an anti-Semite, this thing that I had detested all my life."

But that did not stop him writing more about American Jews, including tales of adultery that earned him fresh attacks but were rooted, he insists, in real life.

Good fiction, he tempers, also needs to overshoot reality - because "life isn't good enough in some ways."

Take the sex in his books, often copious and graphic, from the now-famous masturbation scenes in "Portnoy's Complaint" to the no-holds-barred portrayals of grown-up sex in his later works.

"I love to write about sex. It's a vast subject. And depicting it, describing it is hard," Roth says. But he adds: "Whether you believe me or not, most of the events in my books never happened."

Roth also readily admits writing is a way to keep depression at bay: "My worst times are when I'm not writing. I'm prone to get unhappy, depressed, anxious. So I need it."

Suffering, whether it is memories unraveled on the psychiatrist's couch or the physical kind - he suffers from chronic back pain - has played a large part in Roth's journey.

The writer admits that pain has driven him to the brink of suicide in the past.

"When you're not crazed by the pain, you're crazed by the drugs. It's a plague," he says. "It's there when you wake up in the morning and you've got to be a lot stronger than I am to not begin to be affected psychologically."

"You don't have to go looking for suffering if you want to be a writer - it will find you soon enough," he says with a chuckle.

The documentary wraps up on a poignant note, as Roth reflects on death and "how dying affects the lives of those who are going to die" - the subject of four of his recent works including "Everyman" and "Nemesis."

"The time is running out," he says matter-of-factly. "There's nothing I can do about that, there's nothing to be done."[Read More]

Agence France-Presse, 'Philip Roth opens up about art, sex and death'

interaksyon.com, 17 September 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth
• Philip Roth wins Man Booker International Prize
• Where to start with Philip Roth?
• Television Interview with Philip Roth (2010)

Will Cormac McCarthy win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Odds are he just might

Cormac McCarthy

The next Nobel Prize for Literature will not be awarded until October this year, but already speculation is beginning to grow. Various betting agencies are moving in on the discussion, with UK agency nicerodds.co.uk even going so far as to compile a list of odds. The current favourite is American writer Cormac McCarthy, known for novels such as The Road and No Country for Old Men (link via Susan Tomaselli):

According to online UK betting agency nicerodds.co.uk, Cormac McCarthy is again the favorite to take out the lucrative prize. The agency is offering odds of 8 to 1 for McCarthy. The second favorite is Japan’s Haruki Murakami (9 to 1) with Algerian novelist, translator and filmmaker Assia Djebar currently listed in third place (10 to 1).

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2011 Top 10 Favorites
Cormac McCarthy – 8 to 1
Haruki Murakami – 9 to 1
Assia Djebar – 10 to 1
Don Delillo – 13 to 1
Ko Un – 15 to 1
Amos Oz – 15 to 1
Philip Roth – 15 to 1
Adonis – 17 to 1
Joyce Carol Oates – 17 to 1
Thomas Pynchon – 17 to 1

Source: Suite 101

Philip Roth on reading fiction

American novelist 'wises up'

Philip Roth

From an interview published in the Financial Times, posted over at Slate (link via Maud Newton):

His most recent book, Nemesis, published last year, is a return to Newark and for many commentators a triumphant return to high form after its more lackluster predecessor, 2009's The Humbling. Nemesis is set in Newark during the Second World War amid a polio epidemic that savagely attacks the children of the poor. Fear and panic start to kick away life's fragile edifices and anti-Semitism raises its head.

"For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that, I was a boy, I didn't find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam war. I started to try to write the book that became American Pastoral back in the 1970s, when the war was just ending, but I couldn't do it. It took another 20 years. I wouldn't know what to write [about Iraq and Afghanistan, or 9/11]. It does take me 20 years to figure it out.

"That book, Nemesis, began when I didn't know what to write next and I made a list of events through which I'd lived and which I'd never examined in fiction, never presented in fiction. Polio was on the list and when I went back through the list I found I'd circled polio."

"The polio epidemic in 1944 did not exist. It's fictional. I knew one or two kids who had the disease, I heard the stories, but no one close."

It is such a potent metaphor for attack on the home front, especially during wartime, that it evokes American Pastoral's human terrorist, the adored daughter of a high-achieving family turned murderous bomb-throwing war protester. But Roth is disinclined to talk in terms of metaphor. In a New Yorker interview, he indicated that allegory was a form he disliked and, during our conversation, he more than once says of a work we are discussing: "Well, it's about what it's about."

For a writer whose work has always played dark games with truth and illusion, with alter-egos and their doubles, with protagonists and narrators who both are and aren't their author, with phoney confessions, fake biography, false history, with the laying of deceptive trails through the paths of narrative, this is a pretty clear way of saying: "Just read the books."

That's what the writer—who is regularly described as "famously private" or "reclusive," yet might just be tired of questions—really does seem to want. As we talk, Roth is perfectly courteous, perfectly charming, perfectly defended. Half a century of celebrity, since the publication of Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 brought him money and a turbulent kind of fame at the age of 36, has made him a master of the polite no-go sign. The conversation I'd longed to have with him since I first read him many decades ago, a conversation about fiction itself, died an early death.

"I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did."

How so?

"I don't know. I wised up ..." [Read More]

Jan Dalley, 'At Home with Philip Roth'

Slate (Stories from the Financial Times), 26 June 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth

Television Interview with Philip Roth (2010)

 Roth discusses his life and career as Nemesis is published

Philip Roth. Photograoh: Eric Thayer.

Philip Roth revisits his childhood home with CBS News and reflects on ideas of fame and literary legacy. The interview includes a mention of his recent novel, Nemesis, and Roth answers questions about solitude, unhappy characters, the impact of Portnoy's Complaint, sex as a subject for writing, and his opinion of religion. [Watch the interview]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth

Philip Roth: Man Booker International Interview

30 Minute Interview with the American novelist

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth