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“I don’t want to read fiction, I don’t want to write it, and I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. I dedicated my life to the novel. At the exclusion of nearly everything else. It’s enough!”
-- Philip Roth
A recent splash in the literary world was the big announcement by Mr. Roth that he is retiring. I have to confess that I have not read anything by the man, but I will use this news as a spur to put "Portnoy's Complaint" on my 'wanna read' list. I've long been curious about it but never got around to it.
_ _ _
For fans of Philip Roth, his recent announcement that he’s “done with fiction” will have come not just as a sad blow, but also as a genuine shock. It’s a bit like hearing that Keith Richards has given up rock and roll — or that the Pope is abandoning religion.
After all, in a profession not unknown for the obsessiveness of its practitioners, Roth has taken things further than most. “My autobiography,” he said as long ago as 1981, “would consist almost entirely of chapters about me sitting alone in a room looking at a typewriter. The uneventfulness … would make Beckett’s The Unnamable read like Dickens.”
And, as it turns out, he wasn’t joking. When his relationship with Claire Bloom was in its first romantic flush, he invited her to spend three weeks at his home in rural Connecticut. According to one of the many slightly bewildered sections in her autobiography Leaving A Doll’s House, he then spent every day writing in his study — and every evening reading Conrad, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky. When the Berlin Wall fell, he warned fellow novelist Ivan Klíma of the dangers now posed to Czech literature by commercial television — which “almost everybody watches all the time because it is entertaining [his, presumably scornful, italics].”
In his commitment to such high-mindedness, Roth was perhaps a product of his generation. As the millennium approached, his contemporary John Updike was asked why writers who first emerged in the Fifties were still dominating American fiction. “We weren’t idealistic about much, we children of the 1950s,” he replied, “but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition — not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark.”
-- James Walton at The Telegraph
-- Philip Roth
A recent splash in the literary world was the big announcement by Mr. Roth that he is retiring. I have to confess that I have not read anything by the man, but I will use this news as a spur to put "Portnoy's Complaint" on my 'wanna read' list. I've long been curious about it but never got around to it.
_ _ _
For fans of Philip Roth, his recent announcement that he’s “done with fiction” will have come not just as a sad blow, but also as a genuine shock. It’s a bit like hearing that Keith Richards has given up rock and roll — or that the Pope is abandoning religion.
After all, in a profession not unknown for the obsessiveness of its practitioners, Roth has taken things further than most. “My autobiography,” he said as long ago as 1981, “would consist almost entirely of chapters about me sitting alone in a room looking at a typewriter. The uneventfulness … would make Beckett’s The Unnamable read like Dickens.”
And, as it turns out, he wasn’t joking. When his relationship with Claire Bloom was in its first romantic flush, he invited her to spend three weeks at his home in rural Connecticut. According to one of the many slightly bewildered sections in her autobiography Leaving A Doll’s House, he then spent every day writing in his study — and every evening reading Conrad, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky. When the Berlin Wall fell, he warned fellow novelist Ivan Klíma of the dangers now posed to Czech literature by commercial television — which “almost everybody watches all the time because it is entertaining [his, presumably scornful, italics].”
In his commitment to such high-mindedness, Roth was perhaps a product of his generation. As the millennium approached, his contemporary John Updike was asked why writers who first emerged in the Fifties were still dominating American fiction. “We weren’t idealistic about much, we children of the 1950s,” he replied, “but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition — not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark.”
-- James Walton at The Telegraph
