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Given a tight deadline, Roth reread five of Malamud’s books in a week,
The two subsequently met in Roth’s studio and talked for some thirteen hours; as Miller liked to say ever after, “I’d never talked to anybody this long and intense and didn’t get laid.”
Roth’s last-ever trip to London in 1990—
“Adultery makes numerous bad marriages bearable and holds them together and in some cases can make the adulterer a far more decent husband or wife than … the domestic situation warrants.
No wonder even some of Roth’s most incisive admirers tend to be a little reluctant to revisit Shylock as elective reading. “I can see it’s a dazzling piece of work,” said Hermione Lee, “but I feel like Keats sitting down to read King Lear again.” She laughed. “Must I again?”
“You know, you say terrible things about your wife,” one of the women patients remarked, “but I see you having dinner with her and you seem to enjoy each other.” Roth smiled: “That wasn’t my wife.”
watching him cross the street to his apartment building, she reflected that he’d chosen the life of “a bitter, lonely, aging ascetic with no human ties.”
the man who swallowed his friend’s tropical fish and choked to death.
(“a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his character”),
By the time she was thirty-five or so, Golier wanted to marry and start a family—with Roth, preferably, who “thought very seriously” about it but finally declined, given his advanced age and “crushingly unsuccessful” marital history.
“if gullibility (that is, unforgivable naiveté about the horrors of the Soviet Union’s totalitarian thuggery) wasn’t the major idiocy of the American left, I don’t know what was.”
