Philip Roth

It has been a fecund day, the rain abated and allowed me a lengthy walk, and i have returned to read for a few hours, have read 200 pages of Plot Against America and have reflected on my protean relationship with the author. It was in 1997 that I first read Zuckerman Bound which included the first three Nathan Zuckerman novels. This followed a ripe summer of reading Pynchon (Mason and Dixon was purchased the day of its release and Gravity's Rainbow) and broaching the Roth felt a disappointment at the time. I appreciated the images of Ghost Writer, the first novel, but was unmoved by the charicature of Bellow and Anne Frank making mad adjustments of the collective pysche of American Judaism. The two remaining novels did little to stir this conception, the neurotic fixation on an unknown spinal pain, the recourse through Mann's Magic Mountain -- it all pissed me off at the time.

That said, I retruned to Roth later in the autumn, just as my personal life was about to go loop-de-loop. It was Operation Shylock and it may have been the library's copy, I'm not sure, but I devoured the 400 page novel in two days and was riveted this time by the collage of Israel, international finance and a war crimes trial in the late 1980s. It was likely joel who spurred my subsequent appreciation: a few years had elapsed and he and i were browsing at Harold's, he bought Sabbath's Theater and I some Jane Austin (to which he still chides me, fucker). He absolutely RAVED about the novel and sometime shortly there after i bought American Pastoral and despite its shortcomings (the true drama of the novel is only inferred) I enjoyed it and read Goodbye Columbus not long after which I found heroic and charming. It was few years later and joel bought Roger and I the Human Stain which we all enjoyed immensely, even if it was gutted for the silver screen. This nearly brings us up to date with Joel and I discussing the Dying Animal and my own mixed reaction to I Married A Communist - the title of which is a particular joke around my house.