Category: Philip Roth

Philip Roth Presents

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Philip Roth

Naturally, Nextbook has flooded the zone on Philip Roth’s new novel, Indignation. The site is following assessments of the book in its Filter, the Los Angeles Times‘ David J. Ulin contributes his own lengthy (middling) review, and there’s an interesting piece by Josh Lambert on how a rarely read early Roth story, “The Contest for Aaron Gold,” became a rarely seen episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The article points out that almost from the start, Roth wasn’t much for visual adaptations of any literary work, let alone his:

In 1957 and 1958, Roth wrote biting appraisals in The New Republic of two flashy adaptations of classic Ernest Hemingway novels. He lampooned The Sun Also Rises (1957), starring Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power, by reviewing it in the form of a Hemingway parody (“Until they get to Spain it is a bad conversation piece. It is very slow until Spain”). A few months later he dismissed David O. Selznick’s A Farewell to Arms (1957) as “a spiritless, silly, and . . . embarrassing movie,” noting that Hemingway’s novelistic achievements would be “impossible . . . for a camera to convey.” Long before producers started banging on his door, before Richard Benjamin became Neil Klugman and Portnoy’s Complaint fetched $350,000 for its film rights, Roth had concluded that movies were irrelevant to his literary work, a notion made explicit years later when he told a producer, who had asked him what sort of involvement he wanted to have in the film adaptation of The Human Stain, that all he cared about was that the check cleared.

Roundup: The Ghost Writer

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Foster Wallace, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Philip Roth, Ray Bradbury

Today is “Indignation Day,” Philip Roth‘s anti-book-tour book tour, in which he’ll read via Web to audiences at various shops (PDF) around the country. (The only store in the D.C. area taking part is the Georgetown University bookstore.) As much as I like Roth, and Indignation, this seems destined to be a cold, uninteractive experience.

“Why is there no opera of The Scarlet Letter?” asked Alfred Kazin in 1992. David Mason and Lori Laitman at the University of Central Arkansas are working on it. “We considered a number of different kinds of books,” Mason tells the Log Cabin Democrat. “The shorter novels of Henry James, Willa Cather and Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ which I continue to think would make a good opera in an odd way.”

Somebody bring that last bit of news to Texas. As part of the Big Read, the NEA’s effort to promote classic American literature, David Kipen (an acquaintance) is driving a hybrid around the country and meeting with reading groups. Today he’s talking up Fahrenheit 451 in Mesquite, Texas.

Wikipedia trolls, keeping it classy. (David Foster Wallace‘s entry looks OK now.)

Roundup: High Fuel Costs

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Amiri Baraka, Donald Goines, Larry McMurtry, Paul Auster, Philip Roth

Larry McMurtry is “outta gas” when it comes to writing fiction, he told a Dallas crowd last night during a conversation with Diana Ossana, his Brokeback Mountain screenwriting partner.

In the Rake, Max Ross takes the all-star break as an opportunity to note a couple of new baseball novels, and revisit a couple of familiar ones, including Philip Roth‘s exasperating The Great American Novel.

For the past two years Wayne State University has been amassing an sizable collection of rare books and manuscripts by black writers with some connection to Detroit. Among the holdings are works by Amiri Baraka, Donald Goines, W.E.B. DuBois, and more.

Ted Gioia has launched a new feature at Blogcritics Magazine called “The New Canon,” addressing the best works of fiction published since 1985. Not a bad way to start.

It’s a Dystopian Novel, People

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Michael Chabon, Philip Roth

I don’t entirely disagree with James Lewis‘ review of Michael Chabon‘s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in the American Thinker. “Plotwise the novel is shapeless, as if the writer could not restrain himself and trim the excess,” he writes, and it’s a fair complaint. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay managed to be sleek and epic simultaneously, while The Yiddish Policemen’s Union clangs about, its deeply imagined world not quite connecting to its dry, overextended plotting. The remainder of Lewis’ review, though, is an interestingly rageoholic misreading:

There is no love unspoiled by hate in this book, there is no joy or pleasure, no innocence and playfulness, no music and dancing, there are no High Holidays, there are no happy children in Chabon’s imaginative world.

This is a bit like complaining that Robocop didn’t have enough love scenes. The American Thinker is a repository of right-wing vitriol, and its book reviews are clearly no different. (Lewis introduces Chabon to the reader by calling him “an American Leftwing atheistic Yiddishist, living, significantly, in Berkeley, California.”) Yet what struck me about this post is that I haven’t stumbled over much like it—I thought that there would be more of this nuttiness, both among critics and commenters, when the novel came out. Same goes for Philip Roth‘s The Plot Against America, another successful novel about a Jewish dystopia that didn’t seem to ruffle many feathers. Maybe the novel doesn’t have the power to provoke that it once did?

On Deck

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Bernard Malamud, David Carkeet, Mark Harris, Philip Roth, Ring Lardner, Robert Coover

Nicholas Dawidoff, author of The Catcher Was a Spy, an intriguing biography of Moe Berg, has a roundup in the Wall Street Journal of five great works of baseball fiction. (David Carkeet‘s The Greatest Slump of All Time was news to me.) Sportswriters may be the last batch of journalists (who aren’t book reviewers) with an affinity for fiction. In the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, Derrick Goold hunts for a model for Rick Ankiel, the Cardinals’ hot pitching prospect turned hot slugging prospect. Goold turns to Philip Roth‘s junky baseball satire, The Great American Novel:

There’s also the lesser-known Luke Gofannon, from The Great American Novel. Gofannon is the best player ever to hoist a bat for the Port Ruppert Mundys in Philip Roth’s classic sendup, and he’s described purposefully Ruthian:

The iron man came up in 1916 as a kid pitcher, and then played over two thousand games in center field for the Ruppert club, scored close to fifteen hundred runs for them, and owned a lifetime batting average of .372 — the fella who was the Mundys to the three generations of Rupe-it rootas! … In his prime, they’d give him a hand just for striking out, that’s how beautiful he was, and how revered.

Roundup: Drives Like a Dream

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Keith Gessen, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Richard McCann

You may have heard this week that luxury-car-maker Lexus has gotten into the business of publishing fiction—branded fiction about one of their new models, written by nine different authors. Jane Smiley and Curtis Sittenfeld are among the best-known novelists participating; I spoke with Richard McCann, the author of the second chapter of the novel, about his work on the project for Washington City Paper‘s blog, City Desk.

I’m with Keith Gessen, speaking about his own novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, with the Oregonian: “Honestly? It’s a very flawed book in a lot of ways. It’s like half a novel. The impulse at the beginning was short stories, and the last half is more like a novel. As a novel, it has serious flaws, structural deformities that result from it taking so long to finish.”

The Wall Street Journal reviews Michael Zaid‘s The Secret of Fame, a book-length study of literary reputations. Here we learn that—surprise!—Philip Roth might be a shade neurotic about his reputation: ” On the jacket flaps of Philip Roth’s recent books we are told that, apart from winning the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mr. Roth has won an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters—the “Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others.” Mr. Roth wouldn’t have mentioned the award’s previous winners if he hadn’t been anxious about his status, aware that most literary prizes – unlike a businessman’s bank account – possess uncertain value.”

In the NYTBR NYRB Michael Dirda celebrates Peter Matthiessen‘s Shadow Country, a reworking of three of his previous linked Everglades-set novels into one volume:

From this spotty and sometimes contradictory historical record enhanced by contemporary rumors and the recollections of old-timers, Peter Matthiessen has fashioned a novel of Faulknerian power and darkness, one that embraces the American experience from the time of the Civil War to the first years of the Depression. Its themes are those that brand us as Americans to this day: the belief in self-transformation and renewal, the hunger for property and respectability, perfervid patriotism and xenophobia, the legacy of the Civil War, ongoing racial fears and anxieties, rampant greed, the rape of our wild places, psychological and physical violence in the family, the cowboy cult of manliness and swagger. And, not least, of course, our need for self-exculpation. The end justifies the means. It was him or me. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

The Secret History

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Audrey Niffenegger, Cormac McCarthy, Daniel Alarcón, Daniel Mason, Michael Chabon, Philip Roth

Gawker’s science-fiction blog, io9, has a chart-based study of sci-fi trends in mainstream literary novels. Charlie Jane Anders proposes three types of novels—“alternate history,” “time warp,” and “post-apocalyptic”—which means The Road, The Time-Traveler’s Wife, The Plot Against America, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and more are all fair game for discussion. I don’t think that the resulting chart really argues for a one-to-one relationship between current events and related fiction, but it’s an interesting idea to put out there. It’s certainly true that we got a lot of novels about broken-down Latin American countries in 2007 (Lost City Radio, A Far Country, and The Ministry of Special Cases, to name three), and those books certainly felt like responses to the United States’ political predicaments; add a category for “dystopia” and you may have something here. Anyway, Anders writes:

And then was a boom in post-apocalyptic fiction in more recent years, with three huge classics of the genre hitting in 2006. In particular, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has become the poster-child for the literary-authors-going-speculative trend. These books coincided with the Indian Ocean Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and a worsening Iraq conflict. But there’s been a lull in the post-apocalyptic genre since then as well.

Act Naturally

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jhumpa Lahiri, Philip Roth

The film rights to Philip Roth‘s forthcoming novel, Indignation, have been picked up by Scott Rudin, who coproduced the film version of Cormac McCarthy‘s No Country for Old Men. It’s a seven-figure deal, something that apparently doesn’t happen nearly as much as it used to with novels, according to a Variety report:

The money paid for these books and articles is modest compared to the market boom of the mid- to late 1990s, when Pat Conroy’s “Beach Music” sold to Paramount for north of $5 million and Michael Crichton’s “Airframe” went to Disney for $10 million. Dave Eggers’s “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” fetched $3 million from New Line in 2000.

None of those pics has yet been made. As such, it’s highly unusual for the majors to get whipped into a frenzy that results in a seven-figure upfront deal for a book author.

And a quick DoSP note: I have a brief review of Jhumpa Lahiri‘s Unaccustomed Earth in City Paper, buried in the back of its massive Best-Of issue, which I’d highly recommend as a handy, only-mildly-snarky-this-time guide to the District.

Roundup: Call Your Mother

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Alice McDermott, Dept. of Self-Promotion, Langston Hughes, Philip Roth, Scott Simon

The best line in the New York Times‘ piece on the Philip Roth 75th birthday celebration comes at the very end: “He has delusions of grandeur,” said Roth’s weeping mother when the writer explained that Portnoy’s Complaint was going to attract a lot of attention.

Alice McDermott: “When I go to colleges, I always look at their reading lists,” she told the South Bend Tribune, “and I still see they are very short on women writers. At least now you get an apology. Before, there wasn’t even an awareness of it.” She speaks Tuesday and Wednesday at “A Festival of Our Own: Women Writers at Notre Dame,” at Notre Dame University.

Your moment of zen: The latest VOA Special English author feature is on Langston Hughes.

And a quick DoSP note: I have a review of Scott Simon‘s Windy City in Washington City Paper, and a review of Brian Hayes‘ Group Theory in the Bedroom in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

A New Complaint

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Philip Roth

NPR revisits Philip Roth‘s Portnoy’s Complaint for no particular reason that I can see. (Not that I’m complaining.) The relevant Roth quote, dusted off from a 2005 interview: “I think they were shocked and outraged by the revelation of brutality — brutality of feeling, brutality of attitude, brutality of anger. ‘You say all this takes place in a Jewish family?’ That’s what was shocking.”