Philip Roth gives novel a quarter of a century

25 comments on “Philip Roth gives novel a quarter of a century”

1. Jake says:
   October 27th, 2009 at 10:27 am

   What a load of gibberish. It’s just a grumpy old man despairing of the young and being patronising. I bet people predicted the end of the novel when tv came along. I’m pretty sure they did when computer games came along 20 years ago. The novel’s still here.

   Besides, I think what Philip is really worried about is that people will stop reading *him*. As far as I’m concerned that day can’t come too soon.

   Death to the whinings of tedious old men!!!

2. Andrew S says:
   October 27th, 2009 at 11:07 am

   My father describes my grandfather returning from a day at the office and sitting down with the Saturday Evening Post, to read short stories, before television. TV killed the short story as a form with a mass audience.

   So it’s not unreasonable to propose that the novel could go the way of the short story. Those who don’t suffer from our culture’s widespread historical amnesia know that’s inevitable.

   Nothing lasts forever; the novel will fade away. Whether Roth is right is another question.

3. Mary Soderstrom says:
   October 27th, 2009 at 1:16 pm

   Short stories are dead? Maybe the kind of short story that are the equivalent of Beverly Hillbillies episodes, the kind that people read to fill time. But short stories are still being published and read. Just look at the wonderful collection published every year about this time. It’s currently number 697 on Amazon.com, while last year’s edition is 29,931. Not bad for a moribund art form.

   Mary

4. Andrew S says:
   October 27th, 2009 at 1:48 pm

   Seriously, Mary, you’re trying to tell me that short stories still have a mass audience?

   Poetry is still being published and read, too — that doesn’t mean it has a mass audience.

   Ask a publisher if you’re confused on this point.

5. Mary Soderstrom says:
   October 27th, 2009 at 2:01 pm

   I didn’t say a mass audience. I said a relatively sizeable audience that buys books. This does not mean that writers can make a living from short stories, though.

   M

6. Chris Mehrlein says:
   October 27th, 2009 at 3:36 pm

   “If You read a novel in two weeks, you haven’t really read it.”? Really? How long then does it take to ‘really read’ a novel. Four weeks. Four months? Four years? And what kind of novel are we talking about? Lots of people read genre fiction. And aren’t people who are interested in serious literature a little cultic already? Is he saying that 25 years from now, no one but a handful of people with too much time on their hands will be reading navel-gazing mood music composed by and for people who think that referencing the greats of classical literature on a point system is the same as creating great literature itself. God help us all if that happens.

7. Citizen Reader says:
   October 27th, 2009 at 4:43 pm

   Wow, it’s not often I get the chance to out-pessimistic Philip Roth, but my only thought upon reading this was, “What 25 years? Aren’t novels already at the stage of “cultic minority enthusiasm”? And when I say novels, I do not mean books by Dan Brown or James Patterson, which are really just bad novelizations of bad movies. Weird, that, now that I think about it. Are we SURE that Brown didn’t plagiarize his book from some rarely seen less-than-B-movie from the 1950s or 1960s?

8. Citizen Reader says:
   October 27th, 2009 at 4:46 pm

   Bad movies that were never made, I meant to say, or were made and only seen and remembered by Brown and Patterson.

   I have now officially given this too much thought.

   I will say this for the Philip Roth quote, it’s interesting, and I’ve now given it several minutes’ worth of thought, which is more than I’ve ever been able to give to his novels, never mind two weeks.

9. Robert J. Wiersema says:
   October 27th, 2009 at 4:57 pm

   Chris @ #6 –
   By my reading of Roth’s point, I think you’ve got it backwards.

   By my reading, what he’s saying is that with the reduction in attention spans, and increase in distractions, people are taking longer and longer to read novels, and that if it takes you more than two weeks to read one, you’re not really reading it.

   Which, on the face of it, I agree with — if novels aren’t read with a certain amount of dedication, and therefore in a constrained time period, they lose their unity (or rather, readers lose their ability to see it). So, yeah, if it takes you more than two weeks to read one, you’re probably not actually reading it. (I’d go a bit further and say that if it takes more than a few days you’re probably not reading it, but that might just be me.).

10. zsuzsi says:
    October 27th, 2009 at 9:11 pm

    Robert, that’s exactly how I understood it as well.

    There’s no point dipping in and out of a novel as if it were a bathroom book.

    Say, maybe the golden age of the short story returneth! (that’s me being an optimistic pessimist)

11. Finn Harvor says:
    October 27th, 2009 at 9:43 pm

    “So, yeah, if it takes you more than two weeks to read one, you’re probably not actually reading it. (I’d go a bit further and say that if it takes more than a few days you’re probably not reading it, but that might just be me.)”

    Robert, are we dealing with some hitherto unknown branch of cognitive psychology here? Is Roth doing clinical studies in his spare time?

    And if we’re just trading anecdotes, okay then, your point’s well taken. But I doubt you’d argue that if “you’re not eating spicy food, you’re not really tasting”, so why assume that the psychic comprehension of the unity of a text is necessarily lost after a few days and/or two weeks?

12. Simon says:
    October 27th, 2009 at 10:13 pm

    “By my reading, what he’s saying is that with the reduction in attention spans, and increase in distractions, people are taking longer and longer to read novels, and that if it takes you more than two weeks to read one, you’re not really reading it.”

    This seems to be the point. John Updike made a similar point before he died, deploring that literary novels were now a “genre” (like mysteries, scifi, romances etc.). He was bemoaning the fact that the “serious” novel no longer had a commanding point in the middle of the culture.

    Maybe this was just an artifact of the media scene in the 1950’s when both Roth and Updike broke (Mailer too, who also made similar complaints before he died). Everything was centralized, including print, TV etc.

    Now the only person who might read a literary novel is someone who follows that “genre” as opposed to picking it up because everyone else is. Meanwhile, the average reader is playing video games, surfing the internet and dipping in and out of a novel.

13. Chris Mehrlein says:
    October 27th, 2009 at 10:14 pm

    “So, yeah, if takes you more than two weeks to read one, you’re probably not actually reading it.” I disagree. A book takes as long as it takes, which can vary from book to book. While it might take me a couple of days to read, say, “Hell House” something meatier like “don Quixotie” might take a year. In fact, that’s exactly how long it took for each book and I daresay I spent the right amount of time in each, not just because of their length but because how they were designed to be digested.

    That goes back to my original point. Novels are a diverse species yet when I look at that Roth quote up above, I can’t help but think that in Roth’s mind only one kind of novel counts and, conveniently enough, the kind he writes.

14. Denise Kelly says:
    October 27th, 2009 at 10:21 pm

    “It was a dark and stormy night…” Love that first line—it just won’t quit. It’s like the human brain is hardwired into storytelling; and storytelling has been around a lot longer than novels or books. E-books seem to be getting close to something—maybe in the gimpy future there’ll be a youtube Feuilleton narrative of some kind (Dickens?). Print culture may be dead—but I don’t think the human imagination has heard the “last ding-dong” (Faulkner) yet.

15. B. Glen Rotchin says:
    October 28th, 2009 at 7:53 am

    Yes, Roth was commenting on our collective ability to concentrate when he gave the two week deadline for the reading of a novel like it was some kind of class assignment. His point is justified even if the example is patently absurd. We’ve been reading the bible for thousands of years. The Jewish tradition has us reading a section every week to complete the entire book in either a year (the annual cycle) or every three years (the tri-annual cycle). I’ve read some novels in two days (not being able to put them down and then completely forgetting them) and other novels over the course of two summers (savouring the sentences, wishing they’d never end, and having them enter my core.) At times I read one novel exclusively. Right now I’m in the middle of four simultaneously. There’s no deadline, no rule. If you love books, you live with them, and they take on the tempo of your life.

16. Mary Soderstrom says:
    October 28th, 2009 at 8:28 am

    This thread doesn’t mention the importance of reading groups to fiction. As it happens, I’ve been leading groups in four libraries for about five years, and have been an ardent member of two other informal groups for decades. In each of them people voluntarily decide to read at least a book a month (and for one group, every two weeks) carefully enough to discuss it.

    The only time Dan Brown was featured when I started out the library groups and thought Da Vinci Code would attract members, but most of those who came were conspiracy nuts who never came back. What the groups wanted–and more than 100 people, ranging in age from early 20s to late 70s and from all walks of life, are regular participants in the six groups–was a novel or short story collection with some substance. That’s where the future of “serious” fiction lies.

17. Fenugreek says:
    October 28th, 2009 at 10:01 am

    Who cares what Roth or anyone says.

    If you want to write and you happen to write novels then go for it.

    I have no problem with Roth saying whatever he does.

    There are a lot of people in this world.

    Some of them will want to read your stuff.

    I once entered a gay bathhouse in NYC.

    How many people are here?

    You only need one, answered the attendant.

18. Robert J. Wiersema says:
    October 28th, 2009 at 12:25 pm

    Novels — the gay bathhouse of literature.

19. Finn Harvor says:
    October 28th, 2009 at 11:23 pm

    Doesn’t leave much room for the whores.

20. Charles Demers says:
    October 29th, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    There’s a pretty staggering class prejudice embodied in the dismissal of anyone taking longer than two weeks to read a novel. So somebody working two jobs just never gets to read Underworld, so leave it to the rich snots with unlimited time on their hands? I like Glen’s take on the rythm of reading, which may also explain why the cadence of his own writing is so pitch perfect…

21. Andrew S says:
    October 29th, 2009 at 1:39 pm

    There’s a pretty staggering class prejudice embodied in the assumption that rich “snots” have unlimited time on their hands, wot?

22. Charles Demers says:
    October 29th, 2009 at 4:53 pm

    Yeah, yeah, and reverse racism is heartbreaking, and some husbands get hit by their wives, and some people think liberal platitudes are zingers. Let’s never forget to stand up for the overdogs. The middle class has been shut out of the literary world for too long!

23. Andrew S says:
    October 29th, 2009 at 6:18 pm

    As long as you don’t mind regurgitating unintelligent nonsense, Charles, it’s no skin off my back. But don’t be surprised when I point out that you aren’t actually engaging your brain before you type.

24. Robert J. Wiersema says:
    October 30th, 2009 at 9:16 am

    Charles — with all due respect… are you fucking kidding me?
    You think anybody on this board is remotely rich? You think most of us aren’t scrambling around, piecing together a living from multiple sources, doing the dance of the sugar-plum payment-due-dates every month? Yet, somehow, we find time to read.

    How long a novel “should” take to read is, of course, entirely suggestive and completely arbitrary, but it’s got nothing to do with class prejudice. To my mind, it has to do with doing justice to the work itself, and it seems pretty straightforward to me that the greater the concentration in which a novel can be read, the “better” the experience.

    To make an analogy — Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It runs, what, about an hour? One could, if they so desired, listen to it in two minute chunks over the course of a month. Yup, you’d have listened to it. Or, you could take each movement in isolation, and listen to one per day, over a period of four days — that, too, would be listening to the piece. Or you could sit down and, with a minimum of interruptions, listen to the piece straight through.

    Which approach gives the greater understanding of the piece? Which approach will give the greater appreciation?

    I’m not suggesting that people sit down and read novels from cover to cover (though, to be honest, that’s what I do, as much as I can), but I strongly suggest that extended periods of concentration over a limited time-span will benefit the reader immensely.

25. Charles Demers says:
    October 30th, 2009 at 1:06 pm

    Robert, Philip Roth — who is one of my favourites, and whose comment I was responding to — is, by all accounts, very rich. If it sounded like I was speculating on the portfolio health of anyone posting to this blog, then I miscommunicated.

Discuss