An Essay On Philip Roth

Daphne Merkin wrote The Afterlife: Revisiting Roth’s Promise for n +1 and has a more critical view of Roth and maybe deservedly so as she has read him more deeply than I have. Yet, in this paragraph I see what has fascinated me about the man once I read his books and heard him interviewed on Fresh Air.

And still the fact remains: For all that Roth was and wasn’t, he was first and foremost a writer. He spent most of his waking hours alone, painstakingly crafting one sentence after another; it was what mattered to him in the long and short run, beyond all the careerist machinations. There was a singular conviction and even purity about his devotion to writing that was, or so it appears, unmatched by other writers in his lifetime. One might argue that the underside of this high-minded passion was reflected in his prolific, driven pursuit of women. And, in fact, perhaps they were two sides of the same coin. But it also might be argued that the one side, which was reviled throughout his career and has only caught the light more glaringly since Bailey, might plausibly have had nothing to do with the other: that disciplined and super-human commitment to sitting (and later in his life, when his back pain proved unbearable, standing) at his desk every day, including weekends, writing and rewriting.

Writers write. That Philp Roth wrote about a New Jersey factory town impressed me who is from an Indiana factory town.