Song of a Reformed Headhunter

A colleague said condescendingly that Roth's humor is adolescent. Sure it it, but which of us have grown out of our adolescence so completely that we do not recognize its old growth in our selves? "Portnoy's Complaint" is superb in in its inventive humor. The anti-Nixon satire of "Our Gang" I find rather tiresome. The Kafkaesque "The Breast" is unexpectedly moving. I read the three novels in the Library of America edition.

from an interview Philip Roth gave to Daniel Sandstrom, the cultural editor at Svenska Dagbladet, for publication in Swedish translation in that newspaper and in its original English in the NYT Book Review: Whoever looks for the writer's thinking in the words and thoughts of his characters is looking in the wrong direction. Seeking out a writer's "thoughts" violates the richness of the mixture that is the very hallmark of the novel. The thought of the novelist that matters most is the thought that makes him a novelist.  The thought of a novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters, in the juxtaposition of those characters, and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make--their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.  The thought of the writer lies in his choice of an asp...

The New Yorker , October 15, 2007 Yes, yes, it's a really old number. Reading Peter Schjeldahl's review of Richard Prince at the Guggenheim reminds me of my own reaction to the retrospective of this American appropriations artist. Of Prince's rephotograph of a Garry Gross photograph, of a naked Brooke Shields, aged ten, her prepubescent body oiled and face given womanly make-up, Schjeldahl writes: The Guggenheim's chief curator, Nancy Spector--who, working closely with the artist, has installed the show with excellent rhythm and clarity--hastens, in an essay in the catalogue, to defend the work as social criticism, "a portrait of desperation" exposing the American pursuit of fame at any cost. But she thereby fails to credit (if that's the word) Prince's omnivorous connoisseurship of kink, as in paintings (which have been selling for millions at aunctions) from covers of semi-smutty romance novels featuring nurses. He doesn't diagnose decadence. He...

from James Hall's review of Patricia Lee Rubin's Images and Identity in Fifteenth Century Florence : In her section on vision...she refers to Lorenzo Ghiberti's discussion of optics in his autobiographical treatise, and then concludes that the primacy of sight was "unquestioned" in fifteenth century Florence. Yet one of Ghiberti's most striking remarks concerns the discovery of an antique statue of a hemaphrodite in a drain in Rome: "In this statue were the greatest refinements. The eye perceived nothing if the hand had not found it by touch". No doubt Giovanni Chelleini and his descendants would have thought the same about Donatello's roundel, and would have passed their fingers over it both to appreciate the marvellous variations in texture--and to touch God. Art was cherished and pored over, and not just glanced at on the way to the market, bank or port. *** from Bharat Tandon's review of Philip Roth's Exit Ghost : Exit Ghost 's fo...