Your first Roth cuts the deepest
My case against the Kindle begins, and five books by Philip Roth you should add to your TBR pile
The heater is on full, pushed close to my legs.
The dog is curled up on my lap.
My cardigan is buttoned over a jumper.
Writing in the basement of a Victorian Sheffield terrace has its drawbacks.
It’s damn cold.
But on the upside, it means I can line the walls with my books. (The rest of the house is Ruth’s domain when it comes to interior decorating.)
My fiction is stored alphabetically: A to K on one side of the room, L to Z on the other.
I spend a lot of time just peering at the spines, lingering on a certain book, seeing what thought it inspires.
Sometimes it might be a thought about the book itself, about its contents. Other times it might be an associated thought: where I was when I read that book, how I felt reading it, or something about the person who recommended it.
I suppose this is the start of my case against a Kindle — it’s at least one of the reasons I sneer whenever a helpful friend suggests I don’t need all these books when such wonderful technology exists.
Despite the immense inconvenience of having to cart thousands of physical books around with me (Grimsby to London, back to Grimsby, then to Sheffield) and especially since moving t’ Yorkshire (to a much smaller house, which we’re otherwise trying to decorate relatively minimally to maximize space), my physical books offer me something not even the maniac Musk has managed to invent yet.
Effectively, by lining the walls of my basement with books I’ve collected over the years…
I’ve created a subterranean time machine.
Glenny’s in the basement, mixing up the medicine… and so on.
Let’s turn the time machine on…
I glimpse down to my right:
Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood.
I’m in Grimsby. I’ve quit my job and I’m studying creative writing. I discover Isherwood and learn he created Sally Bowles, which inspired the musical everyone knows about, but now I have some secret knowledge about it. I feel special.
Turn around, and look in the corner:
Snow by Orhan Pamuk.
I get a bonus for having worked at a company in London for three years and I’m single, so I use the money to go on holiday to Istanbul and I’m sat in a restaurant on the Bosporus and I feel like a character out of a Patricia Highsmith novel. I order the just-caught fish and watch the condensation bead on my cold beer.
Spin around again, just next to me:
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt.
I’m in a café on Gloucester Road in London and it’s Saturday afternoon and I’ve got into a routine where I’m able to just relax on Saturday afternoons like this without worry. I have a few beers, read, and then wander back to the flat to make dinner. Feel at peace with the world, with life. It’s good.
And then I’m back in my basement. It’s 2024. It’s freezing.
That’s time travel, John.
Tell me a Kindle can do that. (I’m a copywriter by trade and though I know the advert might tell you there’s a world in your pocket or some such nonsense, I would argue it just doesn’t work the same.)
Anyway…
This is all to say I’m surrounded by books and I can see some shelves are dominated by certain authors.
There’s a lot of Paul Auster up there, and I mean a lot. I mean all of it. There’s a dense Helvetican run of Rachel Cusk near the couch. A slab of colorful Zadie Smith hardbacks in the corner.
These, my time machine tells me, are the main players. The folks I keep coming back to.
So, now and then, as well as sharing my general lazy thoughts on literature and life, I thought it would be good to do some top fives for the authors I particularly admire.
First up, perhaps the last of the “Great White Males,” the mildly grumpy, yet wildly inventive, Philip Roth.
Pick 1: American Pastoral
Your first Roth cuts the deepest, and my first run-in with Roth was American Pastoral, recommended to me by an old friend, James Bainbridge, in Sixth Form college.
It set me up pretty well.
Didn’t know at the time, but I know now that it’s Roth coming into maturity. It’s a “big-picture” Roth. But, as with all the most successful big-picture books, it zooms in on one specific family: the Levovs.
I’m not going to reveal the plot of the books in these pieces or give a deep critical analysis. You can find plenty of that elsewhere and, as I’ve stated before, Lazy Thinking is a self-indulgent enterprise, it’s books through my eyes, the vibe I got reading them.
With American Pastoral, I felt like I leveled up. Until that point, I’d read pretty fun books, edgy and playful stuff from people like Bret Easton Ellis or Douglas Coupland, or proper old-school stuff like Dickens and Orwell (yes, I know there’s a lot to unpack in putting Dickens and Orwell in the same category, but we’ll discuss that another time).
With American Pastoral, here was a modern book, by a modern writer, but it somehow felt both present and historical. It had a timelessness to it, yet it seemed — and still does seem — fiercely relevant to the modern world.
My recommendation: Read this in the garden on a hot summer day. If you can recreate the distant sound of children playing or a game of Sunday football taking place, all the better.
I realise today, that paradoxical duality — the past and the present at the same time — is something that Roth was a master at creating and leads us to...
Pick 2: The Plot Against America
Just go and read this.
Back in time travel mode, I remember reading this — probably in my late twenties — and spending days after just thinking What?
It describes an imagined alternate America where a Nazi-sympathising Charles A. Lindbergh beats Franklin Roosevelt to become president.
It blends Roth’s family’s personal history and some true political history with imagined history and frankly, you leave the whole thing wondering what the hell is real and what isn’t.
It’s a brilliant novel.
A true novel.
My recommendation: Read on a flight to America and watch how passport control looks at you.
After I’d read The Plot Against America, I still didn’t realise just how inventive Roth was as a writer, and how playful he was with form. His middle-period books — such as American Pastoral and The Human Stain — had a gravitas to them that misled me somehow. Plot hinted at something more, but it wasn’t until I went back through his work that I realised how form-bending he was.
Pick 3: The Counterlife
This is a good example of his invention. This is a younger Roth (though older than the Roth of Portnoy’s Complaint) trying to reinvent everything, playing meta tricks but still leaving a lot of the work showing.
I think The Plot Against America works so well because you lose yourself so completely in the imagined narrative, but with The Counterlife, you can see more of the strings being pulled.
Some might not like that. I do. I am a young writer. I’m still convinced being clever is funny and have to fight every day not to write myself into my novel. But here Roth reminds all us hopefuls that you can do whatever you want.
My recommendation: Don’t start here if you’re new to Roth, but make sure you come back to it at some point so you can appreciate his range.
Pick 4: Sabbath’s Theatre
Oh, Saltburn. I’ve never known a character to be so mucky. Sucking bathwater and running around with their dick out, and shagging a grave. So original. So shocking.
No. Sorry. Not new. (And without those scenes, a pretty boring run-of-the-mill college drama. Donna Tartt but not nearly as tart.)
Roth claimed one of the turning points in his writing career was when he learned to “let the repellent in.” This quote has stuck with me. I see it as a modern upgrade to Hemingway’s credo to write one true sentence. Roth’s cuts that bit sharper. It reminds us the truth is often not that nice. It can be repellent.
With that in mind, Sabbath’s Theatre can’t help but be included in this list. (And take precedent over Portnoy’s Complaint because it’s a little richer.)
The protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, pissing on the grave of his dead lover is not a scene you tend to forget. It’s made all the more impactful because it takes place in your imagination, though feel free to put Barry Keoghan in the scene if you like (he’s a great actor).
Sabbath’s Theatre is Roth turning the repellent dial up to eleven and wiping some poo on it for good measure. And I’m here for it all day long — even if I’m not quite brave enough a writer to let my repellent run amok (yet).
My recommendation: Read on the back pew of a church to complement both the physical and psychological discomfort of the book and whenever the vicar asks what you’re reading, just reply, Oh this, it’s just a little comedy, you should check it out.
Pick 5: Zuckerman Bound
I’m cheating.
This is four books for the price of one.
You’ve got The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and The Prague Orgy.
But seeing as the Library of America edition I have contains all of them in one book, and technically, as I seem to remember reading in the (canceled) Bailey biography that Roth wanted it that way, I’m going to recommend the whole thing.
Nathan Zuckerman is to Philip Roth what Jason Schwartzman is to Wes Anderson or Leonardo Di Caprio is to Martin Scorsese (and De Niro used to be). It’s Roth on the page, as Roth would want to be on the page.
And, in many ways, across these four books, you almost have all of Roth.
You have the gravitas, the playfulness, the repellent, the innovation, the big picture, the politics. If a writer left only these four books, that would be a decent achievement. The fact Roth left so many more… well done that man.
My recommendation: Buy the combined edition but pace yourself in reading them. Let the book age with you and dip in whenever you need a Roth top-up.
Do you Roth?
Are you a Roth reader too? If so, I’d love to hear what you think about these specific books, or if you prefer another of his, which one? I’ve not mentioned any of the shorter, late-period novels, which I think are pretty good. Comment, or drop me a line.
And hey, if you enjoyed reading this, you might like to subscribe to the paid version. I know, goddamn money… BUT, there’ll be a whole load more stuff like this coming. Not to mention some other interesting intrigues coming soon.