Fallen reader

I confess: before Nemesis, I studied Patrimony in another class. That was it for Philip Roth. I don’t live so far under a rock that I don’t know that Roth is regarded as arguably the greatest American author of my father’s generation. (Dad was born just five days after Roth and also in New Jersey. For all I know, they lay swaddled in the same maternity ward.) But I haven’t read a single one of his 29 other books.


Reading anything other than what fell through the mail slot was not a high priority for a long time. How long? Let’s see, my oldest is almost nineteen....  At the onset of parenthood, my once-obsessive habit all but died a dust-covered death. Like fallen tombstones, new books lay flat on my nightstand. My intention to read never diminished, even as the pile grew. I’d drop an Erdrich, Kidder,  MacEwan or other touted author into my cart on every trip to Costco. On the stack, these, too, lay still as bones. On rare occasions—a “triumphant work” by “an engaging new voice” would fall into my carry-on luggage on a trip south to see Mom and Dad. I’d hand over their grandkids and pour over the pages while curled up in a chaise. Only then would the stack diminish by a single stone, the book now vertical on the shelf, spine cracked, loved or not loved, but kept for the small victory it represented.


Roth never even made it to the stack. People told me I wouldn’t like Roth. Or that, as a woman, I shouldn’t like Roth, whose fictional worlds are dominated by men. The only reason I didn’t find out for myself was the time issue. It may be that he has, let’s say, chauvinistic tendencies. But so does my father. So do so many men of their era, born into a time when American men saved the world and were adored for it. It seems to me literature that has found its way into our cultural fabric deserve a close look, especially if it caused a ruckus. Even as a child I was aware of the titles Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint before I knew they were books by the same author.


Patrimony, Roth’s 1991 memoir about caring for his ailing father, was edgy and poignant. In anticipation of Roth’s visit to a class at Columbia, I read the New  York Times review of Nemesis and found company. The reviewer, Leah Hager Cohen, was also late to Rothiana, as she calls it. She caught up on her reading last summer and wrote a supportive review.


Thanks to graduate school, I’m finally back on the reading wagon. With two books checked off the Roth list, I’ll read Portnoy for another class this spring. And some time this summer, I expect Pulitzer winner American Pastoral will make it off the nightstand and onto the shelf.

“Nemesis” by Philip Roth: A brief review

I doubt I ever made the connection that polio and World War II overlapped, leaving families vulnerable on two fronts. Philip Roth’s latest book, Nemesis, takes the reader to a fictional polio epidemic in Newark, New Jersey, during the summer of 1944. This short-ish book (280 pages) centers on the misfortunes of Bucky Cantor, a strikingly mature and honorable young playground director who has been classified 4-F: unacceptable for military service. The plainness of Roth’s characters and the emotional restraint he uses laying out one sad event after another give the early sections of Nemesis a factual, journalistic quality. Roth reports the cruel intersection of war and disease evenhandedly, while drawing the reader’s sympathy for the principled Mr. Cantor. 
Nemesis by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010, $26)

Philip Roth pays a call

It began several weeks ago, almost as an aside. “Read Nemesis for December 9,” announced Professor Taylor at the end of class. “The author will be with us to discuss it.”

The author of Nemesis is Philip Roth.

I leaned over to Sophia, sitting next to me. “Wait, did he just say Philip Roth was coming?” Sophia: “I think he did.” We looked at each other wide-eyed.

As promised, Roth was there this afternoon, waiting for us, stretching his rust-colored Mephistos out under the table and scanning the room. He made eye contact, smiled slightly, and responded to students who greeted him. He looked like he looks in his publicity stills: every bit the fit septuagenarian.

Nemesis author Philip Roth

Striking were the exchanges between prolific author and earnest fiction writers on a quest for directives, seeming hopeful for a key to unlock the Roth route to success. They sought incisive explanations for plot and character choices; they asked about routines and regimens, presumably so they might imitate them. Roth was often tight-lipped or gave slim responses, such as “I didn’t think about that” and “I don’t know what style I was writing in.”

I say “they” as though I wasn’t also waiting for pearls. I was speechless, until I stood in line and then blithered out some noise about New Jersey. He signed my book, and I skittered away.

There were pearls, and I scribbled them down as quickly as I could.

On God: “I’ve never been a believer. Ever. [Religion has] not been something I think about as a writer or as a man.”

On the response to his first book written in 1959, Goodbye, Columbus, which on its release, was widely considered Jew hating: “I was called an anti semite, a self-hating Jew, and bad for the Jews. It made me angry and combative….I'd go around to hillels and synagogues and tell them I wasn’t a bad Jew.... But I've come to accept that I am.”

On his earliest works: “Reading the first four or five books I wrote doesn't delight me.”

On writing fiction: “I need to make it up, and I need to ground it in the real thing. And the real thing leads to invention.”

And: “I write from front to back.... I find my way into the book. The logic of the plot directs my choices, and the logic of the characters.”

On getting started on a new project: “Beginnings are hard.... The voice of the last book is usually still in my head. I'll write a hundred pages. Then you go back and figure out what’s alive. Then I take that paragraph and put it at the front.”

That last reminder was perhaps the most illuminating: that even a literary lion casts about for a way into his work.