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Tuesday 9 April 2013

Give Philip Roth the Nobel Prize as a retirement present

Give Philip Roth the Nobel Prize as a retirement present
Philip Roth, the greatest novelist of our time, saved some of his best work until the end.  
 
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.”
Luckily, in both cases, this seriousness of purpose wasn’t incompatible with blisteringly comic fiction. Roth’s own debut, Goodbye Columbus and Other Stories (1959), lifted the lid on the Jewish Newark where he grew up. The result was not to everybody’s taste, with rabbis famously denouncing him in American synagogues for supplying ammunition to the gentiles. Roth’s response, after a couple of comparatively decorous novels, was the ferociously indecorous Portnoy’s Complaint. America’s bestselling novel of 1969, the book did much to popularise the myth of the castrating Jewish mother. It also, of course, gave masturbation its first starring role in a serious (if very funny) work of fiction.
Since then, thanks to what he himself has called the “fanatical habit” of writing all day for 365 days a year, Roth has produced 25 further novels — almost all of them somewhere between very good and authentically great. So, why has he decided to call it a day?
The most sentimental — and therefore least likely — theory is that the single-minded pursuit of literary greatness must have come at quite a cost, and that Roth is now beginning to realise it. Apparently, he marked his retirement by rereading his favourite authors and all of his own novels to see how he’d done. After that, he’s quoted as saying, “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!”
Another possibility is that he’s turned his famous ruthlessness on himself. Roth is fond of quoting the Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner CzesÅ‚aw Milosz that “when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished”. His work, as Claire Bloom later discovered to her horror, has always used whatever and whoever it needs to achieve its crunching effects. Now, though, he seems to be just as unsparing about his own ability to hack it any more: “I don’t think a new book will change what I’ve already done, and if I write a new book it will probably be a failure. Who needs to read one more mediocre book?”
Writers, in other words, may not usually retire — but perhaps they should. Certainly, Saul Bellow didn’t do himself any favours with his last novel Ravelstein, published when he was 85. Not only was the book a shameless and unappealing celebration of intellectual snobbery, but it was close enough to his earlier work to make you wonder if he’d always been like that. (On reflection, he hadn’t.) So, when Roth says, “I don’t know anything anymore about America today”, it might do just as well to take his word for it, rather than have to put up with the kind of embarrassing curmudgeonly rant that Bellow provided.
And at least this way, Roth did end on a high. His 21st-century work has been undeniably patchy — and in 2009 the only real clunker of his career, The Humbling, did at times approach Bellovian levels of embarrassment. Even so, his final novel Nemesis, the heartbreaking tale of a polio outbreak among (of course) the Jews of 1940s Newark, was such a bona fide masterpiece that it’s tempting to think he made one last big — and successful — effort to remind us of his greatness. It’s not a parallel that Roth might appreciate, but think of the Beatles making sure they were on their best behaviour when, knowing it would be their last album, they made Abbey Road.
Now, all that’s needed is a nice little Nobel Prize to honour surely the greatest novelist of our time …

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