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  • Editor’s Column1
  • Derek Parker Royal

As the current special issue of the journal can attest, this is an advantageous time for Philip Roth studies. Last year Pia Masiero organized a conference in Venice, Italy, that featured a number of insightful readings of the novelist, an event that underscored the growing international attention that Roth has been receiving. Several of the papers presented at the conference are published here in expanded form. Along with the Venice symposium is this year’s “Roth@80” conference that took place in Newark, NJ, the author’s hometown and the setting to some of his most memorable novels. This event also had a transnational flavor, bringing together scholars from around the globe and featuring not only some of the most renowned Roth specialists in the field, but, perhaps more significantly, many new scholars whose work demonstrates the continued significance of Roth’s fiction and his enduring cultural impact. We plan to highlight many of the “Roth@80” events in our fall issue of Philip Roth Studies.

Equally timely are a series of media events that have occurred since our last issue. The most noteworthy of these, and certainly the most curious, is Philip Roth’s announcement that he was no longer going to be writing fiction. After almost sixty years of writing, the bad boy of American literature, the Jewish mischief-makerthe man who introduced us to Kafka’s prostitute and Lech Walesa’s buddy, Moishe Pipikhas finally decided to retire his pen. Since Roth made this cataclysmic announcement in November 2012,2 both the printed media and the Internet have been abuzz with commentary, speculation, commemoration, and eulogy. But perhaps we should step back and ask ourselves as critical readers of Roth, is this really the occasion to put our great American novelist to rest? Might Roth have instead, and perhaps even purposely, bequeathed to us even more words to satisfy our readerly appetites?

When he told Les Inrockuptibles in an interview that he had “no intention of writing in the next ten years. To tell the truth, I’m finished,” I did not know what to think. Was it actually true? After all, this is the same writer who has said in a variety of interviews that writing is his life, and that without it, he is at a loss. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t write,” he told Philip Marchand in 2007. Several years later, he apparently disclosed to Rita Braver at CBS News that he will never stop writing. With both Tina Brown at The Daily Beast and Jan Dalley with the Financial Times, Roth fantasized about another long work of fiction, finding a “big fat subject” that would keep him busy until his death. And in 2010, he told Terry Gross that he was a “kind of a maniac” who wrote every day, and then asked outright, “How could a maniac give up what he does?”3 How indeed? [End Page 6]

Then again, this news made sense. Much of his fiction over the past couple of decades, and not just the recent novellaslet us not forget Nathan Zuckerman’s “death” in The Counterlife (1986) or Herman Roth’s brain cancer in Patrimony (1991)has concerned twilights and end points, a fact most certainly not lost on Roth’s critics who use “late style” and “eulogy” urgently and often. It brings to mind the condition of Zuckerman in I Married a Communist (1998), who describes himself late in life not so much as a player, but more of a listener. There have also been the occasional hints that he would drop during interviews, such as describing to Amy Ellis Nutt that writing was “largely an ordeal I have to face every day.”4 On top of this, rumor had it among some who had interviewed Roth over the past year or twokeep in mind, this was “rumor,” the kind of social interaction that led to Coleman Silk’s downfallthat Nemesis (2010) would probably be his last novel, and that they would not be surprised if that is his final (fictional) word.

Yet, I cannot get out...

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