Philip Roth died yesterday.
He was nine months older than I am, very much a writer of my
generation. Saul Bellow, William Faulkner,
Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and J. D.
Salinger were all older, already established by the time I was old enough to read
novels other than Sherlock Homes. I am
not a serious reader of novels, and I think I only read two of Roth’s books, Portnoy’s Complaint and a curious
novella called The Breast, but his
death at the age of eighty-five reminds me once again of my own mortality. As a young teenage high school student, the
writers who meant the most to me were Steinbeck, e. e. cummings, Carl Sandburg,
and Bertrand Russell.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
The Breast was like The Metamorphosis only with an extra dash of eros.
ReplyDeleteIt is a milestone- someone, I think, can write Woody Allen's New York- or Phillip Roth's America- Phillip Roth is gone and so is his America
Philip Roth's America lives on in The Plot Against America.
ReplyDeleteDavid, isn't it unusual for dystopian let alone utopian works of fiction to come to pass? His body of work as a whole hearkens back to a lost age as much as Twain and Salinger do. It is sad and mortifying that Phillip Roth lives on in The Plot Against America
ReplyDeleteI'm originally from Newark, New Jersey as is Roth and Jewish like him, so I recognize places, even streets, and sociological realities from my childhood in some of Roth's fiction, for example, Goodbye Columbus or American Pastoral.
ReplyDeleteIf Roth were not from Newark, I doubt that he would interest me much. There are works which portray human realities and it matters little where they take place: Anna Karenina would be great art whether it takes place in Russia or in Chicago. It is of zero interest that Hamlet takes place in Denmark, not Portugal, but for me at least Roth's value has to do with bringing back stuff from my childhood.
I'm not yet sixty, but having read three or four of his novels over the years, among them the gloriously filthy Sabbath's Theater, more recently The Human Stain, I can testify that Roth's fiction reminds me of my own mortality. But at least they also made me laugh, if uncomfortably.
ReplyDeleteOff topic, but I think Prof. Wolff might be interested:
ReplyDeleteRobert Paul Wolff on Karl Marx – Lecture Series
Posted on 20 May 2018 by David Fields
https://urpe.wordpress.com/2018/05/20/robert-paul-wolff-on-karl-marx-lecture-series/
Thanks for the tip. Maybe someone will view some of it.
ReplyDelete