Philip Roth tagged posts

“France has been defeated, and despite the propaganda and confusion of recent months, it is now obvious that England is losing the war. (Audience cheers loudly.) I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England regardless of how much assistance we send. That is why the America First Committee has been formed.”

That’s from a speech in Manhattan by American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh in 1940, arguing passionately against American intervention in World War II. Lindbergh’s staunch isolationism was hardly an aberration in American life at the time. Much of the country was torn about how to respond to Hitler’s German war machine that was devouring much of Europe, the massive oceans on either side of our continent making gauzy dreams of remaining above the fray more inviting than almost any other country could afford to be.

In his 2004 novel “The Plot Against America,”

 In Philip Roth’s otherwise dark and terrifying Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral, there is an improbably lovely sequence during which the protagonist, Swede Levov, is romping over hill and dale on his gentleman’s country estate, caught up in reminiscences about his boyhood literary hero Johnny Appleseed. Youthful, vigorous and successful before Roth begins to turn the vise of multiple tragedy tighter and tighter on his neck, Levov is concluding his jaunt by cheerfully pretending to toss apple seeds across his beloved land from an imaginary bag on his shoulder.

Having observed him from an upstairs window, his wife inquires upon his return to the house what he had been doing...

Reading is a most curious and fantastic act. The recognition of ink blots set in a certain pattern on a page, the training to decode those blots (often beginning barely out of infancy, before the basic biological function of controlled toileting is even mastered!).

The oft-times visceral response to those blots as we piece them together, run them through our interpretive sieve, and then find ourselves engaged, body and soul, with the stories they tell.

This ability of the written word to transport us out of time, into another world, another circumstance, another set of characters for whom we come to have a deep regard—if not love—this is an astonishing and even miraculous thing, is it not? It makes me want to sing to the heavens in praise of our brains. (And sometimes wail in despair at their misbegotten use…)

Recently I was reading a magazine article on the novelist Philip Roth and his relationships...