I wish I wasn't posting on Philip Roth but I recognize.... something, maybe?

[Mark Kohut]

Kai wrote: The good thing about Philip Roth for the non-native speaker/reader 
is, that the books are written in an easy way. Sure, there is 'frames in frames' 
and other pomo sophistication. But on the level of vocabulary and 
sentence-construction you always catch it right away. 




I was able to go on a group trip to Newark when they named the street he grew up 
on after him. (most interesting part in some way was the wonderful art
on his high school's walls, compliments of the WPA)...

But I was close enough to hear him say soft [per Shakespeare] "boy, of boy, 
there's more" after some plaque ceremony as they moved him up to the street...

And that inner innocence, although now aggrieved, I detected in his voice on a 
late NPR interview with Terri Gross when she segued into calling some later work 
"postmodern" and he said. "I'm the only person I know who does not even know 
what the word MEANS!"....he sounded like he meant it.....he spoke of those few 
works which tell their stories in non-usual ways as "just the only way that 
story could be told"....I believe....

but I'm sometimes an unreliable narrator....