From The Times
October 17, 2009

Philip Roth on America, survival, prizes and writing
For 50 years Philip Roth has been mining the depths of the American soul — and at 76 he shows no sign of stopping

When Philip Roth pokes his head around the conference room door of the New York office of his literary agency, he looks familiar to me — but not because his photograph gazes out from the jackets of his books. I grew up on the Upper West Side of this city, where Roth keeps an apartment these days for when the winter weather at his Connecticut home becomes too severe. He appears familiar because — his tall frame a little stooped, his look a little anxious — he looks, at first, like any number of the older guys you see trundling up Broadway, heading into the Fairway supermarket and peering into boxes of eggs. But then, after the obligatory handshaking and hellos, he settles into a chair, straightens his spine, fixes his dark eyes on me and all thoughts of Fairway are banished from my mind. I tell him I’m glad to meet him; that I get a feeling giving interviews isn’t his favourite occupation. “I have worse things to do,” he says, but I am not convinced.

Philip Roth is a giant and no mistake. The boy from Newark, New Jersey, the son of an insurance salesman, the upstart young novelist whose third novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, caused a scandalous sensation when it was published 40 years ago (and probably put a whole generation off eating liver), has made good. Unwilling as he would be to admit it, he is a scion of the American literary establishment, and surely, now that Bellow, Updike, Mailer and Miller have passed from us, its greatest figure. Roth made his mark with Goodbye, Columbus — his first book, published in 1959. The New York Times noted that this novella and accompanying stories by a 26-year-old “English instructor at the University of Chicago”, as he was then, was an impressive debut, “concerned with depicting the role of the Jew in American society”. Goodbye, Columbus is a boy-meets-girl love story, on the surface: but his characters’ American lives are shadowed by a generational past that has its roots in the European ghetto from which their ancestors, and Roth’s, escaped.

The full story at The Times online.