How much of your life should writing take up?

I was going to talk about this in the comments of the last post, where reader Mark was talking about the consistent quality and prolificity of Philip Roth's work, but thought it was worth a post of its own. I believe the reason Roth can be so good, and produce good work so often, is simple. It's the same reason Toni Morrison gave this past week at Cornell, when an audience member at her talk asked how she could be so productive, even while being an editor and teacher, as she has often been.

I don't really consider Morrison especially prolific, but I certainly do think she produces work of great worth. And her answer was, "Because I don't do anything else. I read books, I teach books, and I write books. That's it." She said that she doesn't go on vacations, really, or "go skiing." She just lives the work. As far as I know, so does Roth--he lives in a small town in, I believe, Connecticut, doesn't indulge in many extraliterary pursuits, and just goes at it like a madman.

I'm not like that. I'm too easily distracted. Some of my distractions, particularly the creative ones, I find useful to my writing, but others of them (posting on internet forums, re-watching the entire "Mr. Show" DVD set, drinking bourbon) are of no particular value other than pleasure. I do think I need to cut down on these things--most of us do, really. (Though it's OK to watch "Druggachusetts" one more time, you have my permission.)

The other night, as I was trying to digest her quite excellent comments on my novel manuscript, Rhian told me that I don't take myself, and my work, seriously enough. If it isn't good enough, that's probably why. I'll never be the artists Roth and Morrison are, but if I want to be more like them, perhaps I should listen to her.

But what do you think? How much seriousness can a writer take? Is the kind of singleness of purpose necessary to create Nobel-worthy work (and where, might I ask, is Roth's Nobel?) even achievable by any but a handful of people? For the rest of us, I'd imagine there is a point beyond which we begin to get diminishing returns--the work will be fully realized, but the joy will have gone out of it.

I think I have a ways to go before I'm there, though, and I really ought to do as the Mrs. says. Meanwhile, enjoy that photo there--it's Toni Morrison talking with my colleagues Ken McClane and Margo Crawford. Morrison turns out to be an incredibly cool lady, as well as an artist of the first rank, and it was a major, major pleasure to get to meet her. (Rhian can tell you about nearly knocking her flat in the cloak room after the reading.)

Indignation

I like the new Philip Roth. Is this surprising? There was a time, several years ago, when I thought the recent Zuckerman trilogy might be some kind of swan song--a late-career resurgence that would be followed by a sighing decline. I'm embarrassed to admit this now, but Roth is the kind of writer whose excellence would seem hard to sustain for more than half a century: unlike, say, Alice Munro, whose genius is steady and reliable, Roth's, since the late seventies, has been uneven. All his books are good, but some are thrilling, and when he started ramping it up around the time of Sabbath's Theater, and kept it there for three more in a row, it was easy to imagine he might soon take a bow and walk off the stage.

Nope. There have been, what, five novels since then?, all of them stunning in one way or another, particularly last year's Exit Ghost. This one is a surprise--no familiar characters, no old men, and most of it takes place at a college in Ohio. Our first-person protagonist, Marcus Messner, is a butcher's son from Newark. When he begins college in a small Newark school, his father begins to worry about him--so much so that it becomes a kind of sickness. When Marcus is out late one night studying, his father becomes fixated on the idea that he is out playing pool, and double-locks the door against him. This event precipitates Marcus's transfer to Winesburg College, a day's bus ride away.

The book is set against the backdrop of the Korean War, in which Marcus is terrified of being killed; his plan is to graduate first in his class, become an officer, and avoid combat. So far it's a rich, if simple, story--but fifty pages in, Roth does something shocking. I'm gonna spoil this small surprise, so if you care, stop reading. But in the wake of the book's pivotal event (I am delighted to tell you that it is a blow job), we get this:

What happened next I had to puzzle over for weeks afterward. And even dead, as I am and have been for I don't know how long, I try to reconstruct the mores that reigned over that campus and to recapitulate the troubled efforts to elude those mores that fostered the series of mishaps ending in my death at the age of nineteen.

There's your novel, right there. The blow job comes from Olivia Hutton, a willowy gentile with razor scars on her wrist, lots of sexual experience, and a violent aversion to talking about her father. Marcus's relationship with her lies at the center of a series of accidents and misjudgements (including clashes with the Dean, a lunatic roommate, a quickly declining father back in Newark, and a dalliance with a Jewish fraternity) which do indeed lead to death.

This death--Marcus is telling the story from a kind of athiest purgatory, and the act of remembering consumes his consciousness; it's easy to see this riffing as Roth's contemplation of the novelist's creative dream-state: "...Would death have been any less terrifying if I'd understood that it isn't an endless nothing but consisted instead of memory cogitating for eons on itself? Though perhaps this perpetual remembering is merely the anteroom to oblivion." So we get this, but mostly we get Marcus's wild descent into his doom. Olivia's disturbed, if poised, lasciviousness gives way, toward the book's conclusion, to a campus-wide panty raid; Marcus's visiting mother complains about his declining father, "I cannot sleep beside him in the bed anymore." Marcus finds his dorm room ransacked, and anointed with semen. In each case we see sexual urges deflected, reflected, and perverted, and if gives you to wonder if plain old wholesome sex is even something that exists in Roth's world.

Well, if it doesn't, that's fine by me. Marcus is so cheerful and energetic in charting his own death spiral that the book is actually kind of a delight to read; Rhian kept coming into the room and asking me what I was chortling about. I feel as though this was an easy one for Roth; it's like watching Emeril Legasse make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. In any event, Roth is still on fire, and I did something with this book I haven't done in many, many years (and haven't had the time to do): I opened it up, sat down, and read the whole thing, cover to cover, without interruption. The fact that I would want to should tell you something.

Another Exit Ghost Post

I wanted to throw in my two cents about the new Roth, too--just because Rhian works at the bookstore, she got to have it first. I just finished it and must agree with everything she said...and reiterate her admission of being at a loss. It's hard to comprehend how such a brief, direct piece of work can be about so many things--among them death, sex (of course), the role of literature in a debased culture, the role of the critic in literature, the role of the biographer to his subject. The imagination, the ego; desire and debasement. Bush. September 11th. Arrogance. Impotence.

One thing Rhian didn't mention, and which struck me powerfully about this book, is how completely it is a sequel to The Ghost Writer (and I think Ed, in the comments of Rhian's post, is right--it was the first Zuckerman book). That novel and this one are bookends to Zuckerman's career; they are written in the same style, feature the same characters (though Lonoff is presented only as a memory), and are the products of the same narrative approach: there is the supposedly objective reality that Zuckerman presumes to show us, and the imagined one which serves as its doppelganger (the same role Zuckerman plays, for Roth).

This time, though, Zuckerman can't control that imagined reality--he's losing his mind, and with it his grip on the narrative. He is dissolving, coming in and out of focus like Hamlet's father outside the castle in Elsinore (and surely it's from Hamlet that this title comes--the twice-repeated stage direction that ushers that harbringer of bad tidings off the stage.) Zuckerman's a ghost because he's disappearing; he's a ghost because he will soon lose all influence over his place in the world, his legacy, what his work means, what his life means.

There are all sorts of wonderful goodies here--the return of Amy Bellette as a terminally ill old woman in a shabby apartment filled with mementoes of her five years with Lonoff; Zuckerman's bewilderment at the changes wrought in New York since he last saw it more than a decade before; angry young Democrats speaking in blogger-ese; the dull details of Zuckerman's incontinence, and the embarrassing confidence of the doctor who tries to cure him.

But ultimately the big deal here is what Rhian has already mentioned--Roth's prose, which is stunning in its clarity and simplicity, its erudition and sophistication. This is not a contradiction: Roth is a writer who makes you feel like a genius. His prose is a vessel far larger than it appears; it's infinitely capacious but you can fold it up and put it in your pocket.

I liked Roth when I was a teenager, and followed him (not without dismay) through his period of marital strife, sexual angst, and identity madness (The Counterlife and Operation Shylock have melded, in my memory, into one big brilliant mess), and emerged into outright worship beginning with his move to the country and publication of American Pastoral, which Rhian and I both read at the hospital in the exhausting days right after our older son was born. The man has been on a holy tear ever since, and long may it last.

Philip Roth's Exit Ghost

This book is so good I can barely stand it. Roth is simply a master, and I'd feel like a fool if I pretended to engage in "serious criticism" of his work -- his work is the most serious criticism of all. For example, a character writes in a letter to the New York Times:

The way in which serious fiction eludes paraphrase and description -- hence requiring thought -- is a nuisance to your cultural journalist. Only its imagined sources are to be taken seriously, only that fiction, the lazy journalist's fiction...

And a bit later on in the same letter:

If I had something like Stalin's power, I would not squander it on silencing the imaginative writers. I would silence those who write about the imaginative writers... I'd outlaw reading groups and Internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to be certain that no clerk ever spoke to a customer about a book ... I'd do this for as many centuries as are required to detoxify the society of your poisonous nonsense.

Heh heh.

Reading Roth's prose is like drinking clear water after a lifetime of Tab and box wine. It feels like the only acceptable prose: completely truthful, insistently intelligent, and devoid of lyricism and posturing. This is the last Zuckerman book, and when Roth goes, something really big will have ended. And we won't know what that is until we see what comes next.