Philip Roth R.I.P

Was the best american author in the last 50 years easily

Finally got around to reading a book by him this week (American Pastoral). R.I.P.

Human Stain and Sabath's Theater are his desert island books imo

Don't know if he's the best but I can't think of anyone else that writes with such clarity. RIP

The Zuckerman stuff is my favorite by far

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/obituaries/philip-roth-dead.html

gave my hometown of Noork lit cred

Don't like being a dick on threads but ffs "easily"? Come on. There are honestly too many other candidates to list.

he sure warned us in the plot against america

Went through an attempt at really investigating Roth (and Updike) over the laat few years, kinda gave up after The Human Stain, which I think I found kinda pointless but now barely remember. Did really like The Ghost Writer. xpost The Plot Against America had an ending that made Stephen King look masterful, man that annoyed me at the time

Per easily, who else besides Roth would have been a candidate for greatest living American writer of the 20th century? DeLillo, Pynchon, Morrison ... McCarthy?

stephen king rules endings and all. RIP PR!

Not a huge fan of the idea of "greatest". Mary Gaitskill, Ursula Le Guin, Williams Burroughs/Gaddis/Gibson, Samuel Delaney, Thomas Pynchon, Patricia Highsmith, they've all written books/work that affected me far more and so is (to me) "better" than anything Roth ever wrote. In kinda oldfashioned terms of greatness I'd prob say Faulkner, but I obv have a weakness for writers named William. Can't stand stand DeLillo.

“Couldn’t get it up in the state of Israel” will be forever burned into my brain.

Burroughs is dead fyi

so is LeGuin

but otherwise albvivertine otm

...so is highsmith. they said best of the latter C20, not best living

Per easily, who else besides Roth would have been a candidate for greatest living American writer of the 20th century? DeLillo, Pynchon, Morrison ... McCarthy?

Shakey I was still kinda replying to nostormo's opening post, I guess. It's Pynchon now pretty easy for great living US author, tho I expect an RIP thread whenever he comes up

solid list regardless albvivertine

ah n/m, thanks Ward

shouldn’t have jumped in since I don’t care about the question but I do like albvivertine’s list

Yeah I fucked up replying to that question but it was fun to think of who my fav later 20th C writers were. Also, it's nearly 4am, so pls accept my apologies for dopeyness xpost thanks Brad

ilx not a Bellow kind of place (i haven't read him)

I'm not in love w a lot of modern American "literary" novelists so my vote would probably be some contrarian genre pick like Barry Malzberg (if we're sticking to the "living" thing)

altho I would def take Pynchon over Roth (and DeLillo), maybe not Morrison tho

xpost Yeah, I was going to leap in w/ Bellow until I saw the 'living' caveat. Much better writer than Roth, imho.

Bellow peaked quickly. Roth didn't.

zuckermania is glitzophrenic landscape you can get lost in for weeks

there are SO many dead 20th century American writers than Roth, that widens the field considerably

better than Roth

erm

xpost Bellow's last book was one of his best!

George Saunders must surely have a good claim to being the most imitated American writer since Barthelme.

Would take Marilynne Robinson over Pynchon.

Ravelstein? Ew.

I liked Ravelstein (and The Actual, actually) a lot, yeah, re: late Bellow. Marilynne Robinson sounds interesting.

It tells the tale of a friendship between a university professor and a writer, and the complications that animate their erotic and intellectual attachments in the face of impending death

jfc there are few things I hate more than novels about academia and writers

the awful result of writers taking the "write what you know" dictum too literally

I seem to remember a lot of talk in a hotel and the hamhanded way that the Allan Bloom manque discussed his young male lover

Lol oh man I doubt I'd enjoy it on rereading, if that was a description of Ravelstein. Unless it's about their relationships with their at least vaguely similarly-aged partners, I never ever want to read about older professor types getting with women ever again. Esp Roth's endless "Hey she let me fuck her ass how great am I" crap, man that got tiresome

My short obit.

V good.

Your obit is so pithy and true

https://i.imgur.com/5NE1RJ7.jpg

American Pastoral and Everyman are fantastic, I've read maybe half a dozen of his books and I prefer the later work. Everyman in particular is just brutal. RIP

btw I think we read "The Conversion of the Jews" in... eighth grade? Maybe tenth.

anyway i've only read everything in the Goodbye Columbus volume and Portnoy's Complaint, all at least 30 years ago. Is American Pastoral a reasonable next stop?

I tend to steer people to The Ghost Writer: it's short and contains most of what he'll do later.

yeah The Ghost Writer is great. American Pastoral is his epic. Everyman is really short though, basically a novella. any of those three.

Patrimony sounds interesting. I haven't read any Roth - may give that a shot.

as someone who’s only read The Plot Against America I disagree with Alfred’s recommendation, it was fine but I don’t feel like I got a sense of what makes this guy so compelling to many readers

or I would caution others against making that their first Roth, is maybe a better way to put it

That piece isn't terrible, actually!

but when you mentioned NRO I wondered if their newest intern, a former student of mine last year and well-read, had written it.

The sexual politics of Bellow-Roth-Updike and others (John Barth!) as expressed in a lot of their fiction is obv p problematic - but through time, this writing has acquired the status of almost documentary text, a record of past attitudes and follies.

I like that, although I think many would say that we are too close, or still living with the consequences of this stuff, and that in some corners of the world those attitudes have hardened, for us to approach these books like that.

My first reaction was to laugh at how he died a few weeks after the Nobel announced they wouldn't be awarding it this year because of a sexual assault scandal.

Deconstructing Harry is kinda Rothian

nah, it's just a bad, silly film

it's a great, silly film

given the obvious sf tilt of that list, weird that neither Joanna Russ or Kate Wilhelm is on it

it kinda reads like they made a quick pass by the remaindered table before putting it together. not meant qualitatively, just as a matter of exposure

some very good writers, more I’m curious to check out, not many I’d go to for boner rage

often I am in the library saying to myself "now what can I read that will satisfy my appetite for boner rage"

that's why they revoked my library card :(

4 3 mos in '65 I thought I was dating #PhillipRoth. That's the name the man who became my 1st lover gave me. & as in Goodbye, Columbus, I went 2 Margaret Sanger 4 birth control. Imagine my surprise when I saw the real Roth's pic & it wasn't the man I was dating. RIP Phillip Roth

— Adrienne Barbeau (@abarbeau) May 23, 2018

exquisite

I think Roth was the first great quintessentially immigrant american novelist.

lipsytes nyt opinion article is good imo

Mr. Roth’s body of work is one 20th-century American man’s hole. There are many similar divots and ditches in the literary landscape, but we’ll keep peering into Mr. Roth’s because so few have dug and illuminated with such verve, wit, fearlessness and emotional acuity.

dug into the verve, wit, fearlessness, and emotional acuity of his hole.

I liked the Zadie Smith piece about Roth in the New Yorker.

"At an unusually tender age, he learned not to write to make people think well of him, nor to display to others, through fiction, the right sort of ideas, so they could think him the right sort of person. “Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest,” he once said. "

He was the best. RIP.

Oh all he revealed was old (post I never finished, seems relevant)

I assembled my own where-do-I-start list.

I have not read The Ghost Writer, but I remember seeing this PBS adaptation starring Mark Linn-Baker as Zuckerman.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087331/fullcredits/

dang I thought the 2010 Polanski movie was a Roth adaptation. great movie though.

John Barth!

It’s in either a novel or an essay of barth’s where he raises the question of why rape or attempted rape is so disturbingly common in his (comic) fiction and then basically just says “it’s a good question! but there isn’t time to address it here” 😐

I have never read Philip Roth but I bought a paperback copy of the breast the other week so I think I’ll read that next

Promising title

It’s about a guy who turns into a breast

Promising premise (sorry just being a dick now. Would kinda like to read a novel about how awesome boobs are with no resort to metaphor etc tho)

The breast is great and very funny, actually. It’s a riff on The Metamorphosis, obviously.

Good list, btw, Alfred. I also love Nemesis, which totally devastated me when I read it a few months ago.

Promising premise (sorry just being a dick now.

homage

rip. have read him less than bellow or mailer, more than updike or any of the forbidding postmodernists (except goofy t.p.)

w zuckerman he handled fictionalized autobiography (+ probably sex politics) much less exasperatingly and to much greater reward than bellow w his endless eminent academics or mailer w mailer.

used too many italics imo.

Roth film/TV adaptations, past and future

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5703-will-there-ever-be-a-great-philip-roth-movie

doesnt even mention barry levinsons 'the humbling'

That “minority ethnic community” thing is really something

iirc Adoration was pretty good!

errr Elegy, got my sombre one-word dramas mixed up

Indignation was bad.

The book or the film? The book was pretty good. Not among his best but not bad either.

Some good stuff in here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/books/philip-roths-best-book.html

The movie! I liked the book a lot.

Putting the brutal ending of the book at the front of the film totally neutered it imo.

I'm glad to sense Patrimony come up so often.

Yeah, Patrimony helped me cope w the reality that my father was dying from cancer when I read it. It’s a total gem.

And oh yeah, I never watched the Indignation movie - so much of the joy of Roth’s work springs from his timing and his exquisite precisison - i have no inclination to watch these books onscreen.

It was actually OK otherwise. But flipping the ending completely ruined it.

That Roth’s books should have to compete against one another is unfortunate but perhaps an inevitable consequence of readerly love and writerly death.

Bernard-Henri Lévy:

Roth’s work speaks, at heart, of his crazy, complete love for America. But it also says how fragile this America is, vulnerable to its own ghosts, in constant freefall. It’s that ambivalence, that anxious love, demanding and sometimes desperate, that distinguished him from the other writers of the American pastoral—Mailer, Malamud, Bellow. And it's that love that gave Roth such a singular place in the landscape of American and world literature. I remember the day I spent with him, the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration. We watched the ceremony, live on CNN. I observed him surreptitiously. I listened to his commentary. What struck me was his mix of disgust, malice, and satisfaction, as a novelist, at having predicted and described it all in advance.

The French always like to think everything is about America, lol.

well they're right sometimes

sabbath's theater is fucking disgusting

haven't read that yet, it does sound unpleasant. I thought American Pastoral was really moving

Sabbath's Theater had its dull moments, but when I read it in 2003 its savagery fascinated me. I'm not sure I'd endure it again, though.

I wonder when David Simon's "The Plot Against America" will air? They may be shooting it right now. I also wonder if such a creepily otm book will be too unwatchably otm as a TV show.

to be clear i meant what i said about sabbath's theater in the most positive way. up there with the america trilogy.

can't imagine Plot Against America's shitty ending will play any better on tv