An Interview with Philip Roth

There is an in-depth interview with Philip Roth in a recent edition of The New York Times. Roth has written 31 books and has won innumerable literary awards.

I'm not sure if you come away with a better sense of Philip Roth the man after reading the interview, but it does contain some interesting observations on his works and the writing process itself.

Roth stopped writing five years ago and has been re-reading his own books. In responding to a question about his verdict on his own writing, he quotes Joe Louis: “I did the best I could with what I had.”

He gives a detailed and somewhat defensive response to the charge of misogyny in his writing, noting that: "In some quarters, 'misogynist' is now a word used almost as laxly as was 'Communist' by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s — and for very like the same purpose."

Regarding his years as a writer, he states:

Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it....

With Roth, it's sometimes difficult to determine which remarks are serious and which are tongue-in-cheek, but the interview is an interesting read. For the full text, please see http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/boo....