Philip Roth (1933-2018) will continue to be a notable writer, of the highest level. It doesn’t matter when you read this. The validity that Roth has as a novelist, as a thinker and even as a character. Author of great novels, careful observer and narrator of American society in the mid-20th century, he was also a great transgressor of social norms and behaviors. There is no waste in the work of this American author who was always denied the Nobel Prize. Roth was also a thoroughgoing Democrat and was a relentless critic of American conservatism. Of Trump he said that he was “a massive fraud, the disastrous sum of all his deficiencies, an individual lacking in everything except the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.”
Your book Readings of myself (Ed. Mondadori) is a collection of essays, articles and interviews that allow us to approach various topics beyond literature. Politics always occupied a large space in Roth’s ideas and judgments. Here are some highlights.
“I’m proud to say that Richard Nixon was known as a scoundrel in our kitchen twenty-some years before most Americans began to understand that that was a real possibility. “I studied at university during the heyday of McCarthyism, which is when I began to identify political power with immoral coercion.”
“The amazing thing about Nixon (and contemporary America) is that a man so clearly fraudulent, if not bordering on mental disorder, could gain the trust and approval of a people who, by and large, demand a little ‘human touch’. “to their leaders.”
“Writing novels is not the path to power. I don’t think that, in my society, novels produce serious changes in anyone other than the handful of people who are writers and whose own novels, of course, are seriously affected by the works of other novelists. “I can’t see any of that happening in the average reader nor would I expect it to.”
“Novels provide readers with something to read. At their best, writers change the way readers read. I believe that is the only realistic expectation. It also seems completely sufficient to me. Reading novels is a deep and singular pleasure, a passionate and mysterious human activity that requires no more moral or political justification than sex.”
“Writing satire is a literary act, not a political one, no matter how volcanic the author’s reformist or even revolutionary passion may be. Satire is moral anger transformed into comic art in the same way that elegy is affliction transformed into a poetic act. Does an elegy hope to achieve anything in the world? No, it is a way of expressing a hard emotion that causes perplexity.”
“As you well know, the intriguing biographical question (and critical question, by the way) is not that an author writes about something that has happened to him, but how he writes about it, which, when properly understood, makes it much easier for us. understanding why he writes about it. A more intriguing question is why and how he writes about what has not happened, how he introduces the hypothetical or imagined into what has been inspired and controlled by memory, and how the remembered engenders the whole of fantasy.
“You have asked me if I think my work has changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. It is true that there has been some scandal, but people are continually scandalized, that is a lifestyle for them and it means nothing. If you ask me if I want my work to change something in culture, the answer is still negative. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book.”
