Philip Roth may have retired, but that doesn’t mean he’s done giving interviews. The author recently sat down with the editor of a Swedish newspaper, who talked with him about misogyny, Sabbath’s Theater and the need for “obstinacy” in a writer. (Related: our own Hannah Gersen reviewed Roth Unbound.) (h/t The Paris Review)
“Anything but the perfect external man”
The New Kid
As of last night, the UK has a brand new literary prize, the Folio, which its founders describe as “a Booker without the bow ties.” The Independent chronicles the short history of the prize, which owes its existence to a controversy among Man Booker judges two years ago.
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“An opus d’odure”
Heaven forbid someone ever draws parallels between your writing and that of “Robert Rabelais the Younger.” For his work, published in the nineteenth century, has been described as “the most appallingly bad epic poem to have ever been written in English, comprised of 384 interminable pages of doggerel verse devoid of any literary merit, an opus d'odure that screams stinkburger.” (And that’s one of the more positive evaluations.)
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Warm Ups
As you might have heard, the tenth annual Morning News Tournament of Books will commence this Thursday, and to kick things off, the site held a pre-Tournament playoff round. In it, Lev Grossman and David Gutowski (aka Largehearted Boy) try to predict what Geraldine Brooks will choose as her novel of the year. (Our own Lydia Kiesling takes part on the 18th.)
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Shiny Unhappy People
Julia Fierro discusses her new book Cutting Teeth and the anxiety of privileged Americans in the digital age with Tin House. "They should be happy, but they aren’t, and they are aware that they are not and that they should be, and this awareness makes them loathe themselves."
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Non-Directional Horniness
“Pink Trance Notebooks is the mind working, is material rising from somewhere deep to be shaped and reshaped into blocks of dreamlike text. It is also surface: material gathered from within reach.” Sarah Gerard at Hazlitt in an interview with Wayne Koestenbaum, whose new book is out in October.
While I admire Philip Roth work, I can’t avoid thinking that his need to read his own work, and then to grace us with his revelation upon doing so is hopelessly narcissistic and arrogant. Reading these “revelations” is like listening to a parent go on and on about her children.
Ultimately, it’s how the world judges your children that matters. Not you. Is Roth’s work misogynist? I don’t think so. But a lot of people do. Too bad, Mr. Roth. That question will have to sort itself out over time. We might as well listen to Shakespeare defend himself against accusations of antisemitism in the Merchant of Venice. The play will engage us, if not forever, for a long time. But for all his monumental influence, the great bard doesn’t get a vote in defining what his work means. The same goes for Philip Roth, or any writer.
Let it go, Roth! Get a life! Indulge the retirement you promised yourself and the world. If there is rhetoric in your fiction, that’s there for others to sort out. Your clever logic in interviews after you chose to set your work on its way, disabuses the reading public of none of its illusions.