I would recommend giving "Nemesis" a try. It was Roth's last book and in it he reimagines his childhood in Newark, set in the 1940's. It's so good. I'm not a huge Roth fan by any means, have only read a couple of his books, but "Nemesis" is incredible. I really think you'd like it. The last section in particular, only a few pages long, is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read.
I'm putting Ghost Writer on my reading list. If you're in the mood for more Roth, American Pastoral was one of my top ten reading experiences. So, so good.
The worst part about Roth is how freakishly prolific he was. There are too many books and I want to read them all one day! So I'm glad to see a specific recommendation
One suggestion: start with Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. Those two established him. Then move on to the initial Zuckerman trilogy of Ghostwriter, Zuckerman Unbound (a fictionalized version of the reaction to Portnoy), and then the trilogy of American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and I Married a Communist. Once those are under you literary belt you can pick and choose. The Counterlife is brilliant but requires the earlier books to have been read or it won’t make sense. And Nemesis is utterly devastating.
This is oddly synchronistic with something I was just reading. According to Gillian Rose, Adorno held that modern art (music, literature) fails partly because of an increasing tension (contradiction in Marx-speak) between popular and high art. At all times, there is a tension between creativity, which tries to create the new and uniquely meaningful, and intelligibility and recognizability, which limits how much novelty an audience can consume. Mass culture heightens this tension because art comes to be mainly produced for a very large audience which doesn’t have the training to appreciate much creativity or much depth. But a similar disaster befalls high art. Cut off from the public, high art may develop very creative techniques, but because it is not really communicating with people outside of its own narrow circle, it gives up on communication and becomes, if possible, even more meaningless than the popular art.
I became excited when I read this description in part because it reminds me of your articles the troubled notion of artistic genius. I am very curious whether it strikes you as true to your own experience of the artistic community.
I agree completely. If you look at countries where most of the great literature seems to be coming from these days (Ireland is an example) it feels like the distance between high and low is much smaller than in America. I mean that's a hard thing to quantify, but it just feels like the author like Tom Perrotta, who writes accessible and entertaining fiction, but who is accepted in high cultural circles, has gotten increasingly rare in America, and that because of that segregation, high art is cut off from life and relevance.
I remember discovering the Zuckerman books in college. The CLARITY of Roth's writing was what I found so shocking. How ALIVE this fictional world was. Great stuff.
I loved American Pastoral… I read it when I was writing something about Miss America (one of the characters is an ex–pageant queen). But as another person says in the comments, Roth was so prolific I was sort of overwhelmed with where to go next! So… maybe this one.
Yes my friend got so into Roth that she read ten of his books in a year. This was her biggest rec, along with Sabbath's Theater. I definitely want to read more of his though.
JCO seems to have fewer really high quality books though. I hardly ever hear anyone rave about an actual book of hers. With Roth it seems like at least five or ten of them are worth reading.
i LOVE these two overproducers. I feel you cant go wrong with any of the zuckerman books but American Pastoral is just BEYOND anything else he wrote; human stain is also AMAZING. I like everyone else's recs too, but I also have a lot of love for Letting Go. As for JCO, Blonde is AMAZING. Also love American Appetites, Them, Wonderland, and Black Water.
Roth's scenes can be extraordinary, but in the end, his novels left me feeling rather empty. It was if he wrote a bunch of pages and then sent them off to his publisher without tying the events together. I don't think it's any accident you focused on the sentences, which are indeed brilliant.
In Roth, the whole is much less than the sum of the parts. The human world seems far less after reading him, seems dried up and grim.
He was a rather grim and primly severe man, too. I did not like him. This may taint my assessment of him.
Still, American Pastoral and The Human Stain are worth reading. Everything else I've read by him except one short story has vanished from my mind.
From your story, I can't help but wonder what happened to Rebecca. Lost to time, doubtless. As for Philip Roth, I've read My Life as a Man so I'm familiar with the world of Zuckerman. I picked up The Ghost Writer last night--it's really short! So clever and compassionate at the same time. I certainly agree with your analysis. He found a way to tell hard truths about the human condition without betrayal. I found myself reading passages out loud. His style occasionally verges on punchlines. It's fun. When he finds himself standing on top of the desk to eavesdrop after carefully chastising himself for even thinking about doing it, I laughed. Thanks for the recommendation :)
Made me think of how old math geniuses earned the monicker philosophers and we pass their writings down through the ages but it's almost impossible to be recognized as a math genius now because of all that's been discovered in the field, and even if they were to be a philosopher 10x that of plato we'll never know unless we meet them in person.
Kanakia transforms her reading of a Philip Roth classic into a vaguely sci-fi parable about art and politics today — the time shifting alone is marvelous. Maybe she’s written something better, but I haven’t read it. Short and brilliant, cutting yet generous.
I haven't read The Ghost Writer yet, but this made me think a great deal of Brave New World -- especially that line about Laina being a throwback/savage!
One thought I had is that art is too circumscribed to academia or similar institutions. This divorces art from great swaths of life. I see the future you depict as one not too different from the present, where the writer of fiction has a blind spot to the lives of a number of social classes, whose tragedies and humor are largely unrepresented. If birds could read, they'd likely prefer reading about other birds (i.e., themselves). I have a feeling that most people just don't read fiction because they can't relate at all to what's published.
Moreover, I don't believe that Tom's work is particularly successful in the way he might have intended—simply being read by future schoolchildren or judged as 'serving a valuable or life-giving function.' Instead, it seems his work is designed to fulfill institutional requirements, potentially boring schoolchildren rather than genuinely engaging them. I read Chekov and I see reflected myself or people I know.... Tom's writing appears less universal. Perhaps that's why he isn't classed a genius. He'd likely dread that shortcoming.
I keep hearing about Roth. Thank you for sharing that he is indeed an exceptional novelist. Even though your story takes place in the 22nd century, I believe that some of the concepts are a reality for the present. "In real life, there was very little reclassification, not even in sports and the arts. In practice, because all the resources to get better at these pursuits were reserved for Upper Firsts, it was very difficult for lower-class people to really compete." Growing up, I didn't have much support to become a writer, other than teachers noticing me. My mother encouraged me, but she was and still is at poverty level, and has no connections. It's hard, even in America, to move beyond your natal status to become successful in the arts. Yet, I will not let this keep me from trying!
I would recommend giving "Nemesis" a try. It was Roth's last book and in it he reimagines his childhood in Newark, set in the 1940's. It's so good. I'm not a huge Roth fan by any means, have only read a couple of his books, but "Nemesis" is incredible. I really think you'd like it. The last section in particular, only a few pages long, is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read.
Yay, that's a good recommendation, thanks.
I'm putting Ghost Writer on my reading list. If you're in the mood for more Roth, American Pastoral was one of my top ten reading experiences. So, so good.
The worst part about Roth is how freakishly prolific he was. There are too many books and I want to read them all one day! So I'm glad to see a specific recommendation
One suggestion: start with Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. Those two established him. Then move on to the initial Zuckerman trilogy of Ghostwriter, Zuckerman Unbound (a fictionalized version of the reaction to Portnoy), and then the trilogy of American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and I Married a Communist. Once those are under you literary belt you can pick and choose. The Counterlife is brilliant but requires the earlier books to have been read or it won’t make sense. And Nemesis is utterly devastating.
Edit: Prague Orgy follows Zuckerman Unbound in the Zuckerman trilogy and is short enough to be called a pamphlet. Not his best.
This is oddly synchronistic with something I was just reading. According to Gillian Rose, Adorno held that modern art (music, literature) fails partly because of an increasing tension (contradiction in Marx-speak) between popular and high art. At all times, there is a tension between creativity, which tries to create the new and uniquely meaningful, and intelligibility and recognizability, which limits how much novelty an audience can consume. Mass culture heightens this tension because art comes to be mainly produced for a very large audience which doesn’t have the training to appreciate much creativity or much depth. But a similar disaster befalls high art. Cut off from the public, high art may develop very creative techniques, but because it is not really communicating with people outside of its own narrow circle, it gives up on communication and becomes, if possible, even more meaningless than the popular art.
I became excited when I read this description in part because it reminds me of your articles the troubled notion of artistic genius. I am very curious whether it strikes you as true to your own experience of the artistic community.
I agree completely. If you look at countries where most of the great literature seems to be coming from these days (Ireland is an example) it feels like the distance between high and low is much smaller than in America. I mean that's a hard thing to quantify, but it just feels like the author like Tom Perrotta, who writes accessible and entertaining fiction, but who is accepted in high cultural circles, has gotten increasingly rare in America, and that because of that segregation, high art is cut off from life and relevance.
I remember discovering the Zuckerman books in college. The CLARITY of Roth's writing was what I found so shocking. How ALIVE this fictional world was. Great stuff.
I loved American Pastoral… I read it when I was writing something about Miss America (one of the characters is an ex–pageant queen). But as another person says in the comments, Roth was so prolific I was sort of overwhelmed with where to go next! So… maybe this one.
Yes my friend got so into Roth that she read ten of his books in a year. This was her biggest rec, along with Sabbath's Theater. I definitely want to read more of his though.
Roth and JCO… the two great overproducers of American letters, maybe.…
JCO seems to have fewer really high quality books though. I hardly ever hear anyone rave about an actual book of hers. With Roth it seems like at least five or ten of them are worth reading.
I know some JCO superfans… I think the novel everybody seems to agree is her best is Blonde. (Which I do think is pretty good.)
i LOVE these two overproducers. I feel you cant go wrong with any of the zuckerman books but American Pastoral is just BEYOND anything else he wrote; human stain is also AMAZING. I like everyone else's recs too, but I also have a lot of love for Letting Go. As for JCO, Blonde is AMAZING. Also love American Appetites, Them, Wonderland, and Black Water.
Roth's scenes can be extraordinary, but in the end, his novels left me feeling rather empty. It was if he wrote a bunch of pages and then sent them off to his publisher without tying the events together. I don't think it's any accident you focused on the sentences, which are indeed brilliant.
In Roth, the whole is much less than the sum of the parts. The human world seems far less after reading him, seems dried up and grim.
He was a rather grim and primly severe man, too. I did not like him. This may taint my assessment of him.
Still, American Pastoral and The Human Stain are worth reading. Everything else I've read by him except one short story has vanished from my mind.
From your story, I can't help but wonder what happened to Rebecca. Lost to time, doubtless. As for Philip Roth, I've read My Life as a Man so I'm familiar with the world of Zuckerman. I picked up The Ghost Writer last night--it's really short! So clever and compassionate at the same time. I certainly agree with your analysis. He found a way to tell hard truths about the human condition without betrayal. I found myself reading passages out loud. His style occasionally verges on punchlines. It's fun. When he finds himself standing on top of the desk to eavesdrop after carefully chastising himself for even thinking about doing it, I laughed. Thanks for the recommendation :)
Nice article, was an enjoyable read!
Made me think of how old math geniuses earned the monicker philosophers and we pass their writings down through the ages but it's almost impossible to be recognized as a math genius now because of all that's been discovered in the field, and even if they were to be a philosopher 10x that of plato we'll never know unless we meet them in person.
Kanakia transforms her reading of a Philip Roth classic into a vaguely sci-fi parable about art and politics today — the time shifting alone is marvelous. Maybe she’s written something better, but I haven’t read it. Short and brilliant, cutting yet generous.
I haven't read The Ghost Writer yet, but this made me think a great deal of Brave New World -- especially that line about Laina being a throwback/savage!
This is great.
One thought I had is that art is too circumscribed to academia or similar institutions. This divorces art from great swaths of life. I see the future you depict as one not too different from the present, where the writer of fiction has a blind spot to the lives of a number of social classes, whose tragedies and humor are largely unrepresented. If birds could read, they'd likely prefer reading about other birds (i.e., themselves). I have a feeling that most people just don't read fiction because they can't relate at all to what's published.
Moreover, I don't believe that Tom's work is particularly successful in the way he might have intended—simply being read by future schoolchildren or judged as 'serving a valuable or life-giving function.' Instead, it seems his work is designed to fulfill institutional requirements, potentially boring schoolchildren rather than genuinely engaging them. I read Chekov and I see reflected myself or people I know.... Tom's writing appears less universal. Perhaps that's why he isn't classed a genius. He'd likely dread that shortcoming.
I keep hearing about Roth. Thank you for sharing that he is indeed an exceptional novelist. Even though your story takes place in the 22nd century, I believe that some of the concepts are a reality for the present. "In real life, there was very little reclassification, not even in sports and the arts. In practice, because all the resources to get better at these pursuits were reserved for Upper Firsts, it was very difficult for lower-class people to really compete." Growing up, I didn't have much support to become a writer, other than teachers noticing me. My mother encouraged me, but she was and still is at poverty level, and has no connections. It's hard, even in America, to move beyond your natal status to become successful in the arts. Yet, I will not let this keep me from trying!