Philip Roth R.I.P

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