Philip Roth R.I.P

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

Indignation is a good later one. His second to last novel I think, 2008. But I'd recommend Everyman as a (re)starter because it's so short and so brutal/distilled.

Not a big fan. I've read Pastoral, Everyman, and Portnoy's and found things to enjoy/admire in all of them... but taken in their entirety? Irritating.

fwiw i'd avoid Deception, another short one that is the ultimate "the writer fucks" book

now picturing Russ Hanneman saying "this writer fucks"

sabbath's theater or gtfo

Sabbath's Theater blew my mind in college. Pretty eye-opening to read something like this from one of the "giants" I had heard about at that point.

Former ILXor on FB:
--
25 American Writers, who are women, or people of colour, or both, who wrote novels consistently better than Phillip Roth...

1. Octavia Butler
2. James Tiptree
3. Ursuala Le Guin
4. Samuel Delaney.
5. Toni Morrison
6. Patricia Highsmith
7. Louise Edrich
8. Annie Proloux
9. Kelly Link
10. Maxine Hong Kinsgston.
11. James Baldwin.
12. Maryline Robinson
13. Eudora Welty.
14. Jane Smiley
15. Jhumpa Lahiri
16. Ha Jin
17. Alison Lurie
18. Joy Williams
19. Kathy Acker.
20. Rudolfo Anaya
21. Joyce Carol Oates
22. Judy Blume
23. Mary Gaitskil
24. Lorie Moore
25. Michael Nava
--

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

That list must be based on some straight-up science!

tbh it would have sufficed to say "these are 25 writers you should also read" rather than pretending that joyce carol oates is "consistent" or that judy blume is a better novelist than philip roth

yeah it's needlessly challopsy - good list tho

American man who wrote wish-fulfilment fantasies about his penis passes on, hailed as Great Writer.

— Shailja Patel (@shailjapatel) May 23, 2018

Anyhoo, quite like to read Sabbath's Theatre someday.

Everyman was the first Roth I read, blew my mind. I'm not sure why I haven't read more of him yet.

Usuala Le Guin

re S Patel, i'm glad i didn't get to do a "wait till the gals get done with this funeral" post

(Claire Bloom's book and that protege novel will get plenty of mentions)

Actually wait, I read Goodbye, Columbus first - for my senior comprehensive essay

uh wow @ this, from the follow-up tweet:

Guy who wrote about his sexual frustrations, his gender insecurities, his minority ethnic community; portrayed women as blow-up dolls (when he wrote about them at all); eulogized by US media as "towering," "protean," "infinite voices," "seminal."

would be cool if this presumably woke person could explain to us what she means by putting "wrote about...his minority ethnic community" in a list of roth's bad qualities

xp to xxxyyyzzz Yes, Sabbath's Theatre is the one that's 'often' recommended to me - definitely a book that seems to strike a deep chord with ppl.

Only Roth I've actually read is Portnoy's Complaint, a long time ago, and I remember it as just OK - I think I'd been told about the liver/masturbation stuff beforehand, which prob lessened the shock value of the book, a bit. Round then I was reading round American lit fic of that era and enjoying Brautigan, Pynchon, Coover and yes, boring old Saul Bellow, much more.

I would have to re-read Ravelstein again to properly counter - or concur - with Alfred's damming verdict. I just remember being touched by Bellow's late age attempt to remember a friend, and maybe get some glimmer of understanding into someone who - sexually, socially - was very 'different' (or maybe exactly the same). See too the title story in the Him With His Foot In His Mouth collection, which includes a tender and unexpected tribute to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg!

I've encountered Shakey's objection to novels about novelists/academics before, but Bellow's stuff is v. definitely memoir writing: in eg Humboldt's Gift (poss my fave Bellow, and a relatively 'late' one) he finds lots of good comedy in the life a public writer - it's funny stuff! - while giving us a juicy big portrait of Delmore Schwartz, in sorrow. So Bellow of course writes about who and what he knows - which is a lot! - and imho it pays off in eg Augie March, Herzog, etc.

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 guess that's specifically related to the "infinite voices" bit in the final clause xpost

The cartoonist Drew Friedman posted this on Facebook:

https://scontent.fman1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/33400429_10215241868176207_5848771178180640768_n.jpg?_nc_cat=0&oh=0051696d8d8acf081e91135cb6507c21&oe=5BC3D31B

ok lol

i think that's Mae Questel? the most famous voice of Betty Boop?

(and Woody Allen's mom in "Oedipus Wrecks," a very obvious Roth riff)

Nixon and Haldeman on Roth! Loved this

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nixon-asked-haldeman-philip-roth

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