Philip roth

Call it a gift from the book gods: my literary coming of age coincided with the last decade when the existence of good bookstores could be taken for granted. In the mid-1990s, when I was an adolescent who read every new novel by Updike, Roth and Vonnegut, Amazon was still a novelty. Chain bookstores, such as B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, were as ubiquitous in shopping malls as food courts, cheap jewelers and eyewear vendors. And growing up in a suburb of New Orleans, I also had access to an astonishing number of antiquarian bookstores, including what is still officially my favorite bookstore: Faulkner House Books, the teeny-tiny bottom level of a townhouse in the French Quarter in which William Faulkner set down on paper what became his first novel, Soldier’s Pay.

What makes a novel funny? As well as being too enormous a question to tackle properly here, such an enterprise would, I suspect, require so clinical an approach to reading comic fiction as to remove entirely any possible joy or amusement. As the old saying goes, deconstructing a joke is like dissecting a frog: nobody laughs, and the frog dies. However, the question came to me again recently, as I reread John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. I howled with laughter from the initial farcical scene outside a department store, through Ignatius J.

I have always thought “Call me Ishmael” to be a rather camp introduction to a novel. Given the line’s conspiratorial intimacy, I have long imagined it whispered by a drag queen in a dive bar at 3 a.m. This, however, is the fault of my own unseriousness. The resonance of the name Ishmael — Abraham’s illegitimate son by Hagar who is destined to wander the desert — remains the opening example of one of the clearest, cleverest and most consistent of themes in Herman Melville’s magnum opus Moby-Dick, namely, the quest for God. Religion runs through Moby-Dick. We might almost say that the Bible haunts it. There are the names, mostly of Biblical characters, and even the direct invocation of prophets: Ezekiel, Elijah and, of course, the ur-whale wrestler, Jonah.

When the Queen died a fortnight ago, it was widely speculated that the perfect writer to describe both her death and its aftermath was Hilary Mantel, but now that will never be. Mantel died from a stroke yesterday at the age of 70, leaving behind a unique legacy in transatlantic literature not merely as someone whose weighty novels about royalty in the Tudor era have sold millions, but as an acute chronicler of our own time, too. Not for nothing is her most controversial short story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, a subversive account of what might have happened if a woman she felt "boiling detestation" for had been killed in 1983.

At the beginning of 2021, author Blake Bailey might have been forgiven for thinking that his literary career was not merely assured but stellar. He had gathered significant accolades for his writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Books Critics Circle Award, and he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He had specialized in writing about heavy-drinking Great American Novelists, including the perennially underrated Richard Yates, John Cheever and The Lost Weekend’s Charles Jackson. His most recent subject was the elusive Philip Roth, a man whose literary brilliance was matched by his checkered reputation both on and off the page. Eighteen months later, matters have changed beyond recognition.

Hard to avoid the suspicion the latest clamor for Philip Roth to be canceled isn’t just a marketing gimmick by the publishers of the great man’s latest biography. #MeToo repackaged as a means to shift product, in other words. For what could we possibly now have learned about the author, just three years after his death, that would cause a meaningful reappraisal of his position — with Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo — at the pinnacle of modern literature? That he was very sexy? Is that it? ‘God, I’m fond of adultery,' he is said to have said in Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography, apparently while prowling London on the hunt for Chinese prostitutes. Pass the smelling salts.