NOT PYNCHON. Philip Roth

[Mark Kohut]

He MATTERED so enormously. Towering, yes, "the tower is everywhere"--Lot
49--He took Howe's criticism so seriously, it redefined him (in some ways).


 But you've become "post-modern with this novel, they say" said Terri
Gross..."I don"t even know what that MEANS", he said firmly. laughing.



I would love to have been in that restaurant where, at dinner, he and
Harold Pinter shouted at each other over their differing views of America
as a national power. Pinter was all London Review of Books' politics
(evidently) and Philip, not so much.



 "O boy," I heard him mutter under his breathe at the

dedication of the street named for him, in Newark, when the host/mayor said
there was more as he led us on. He talked of playing baseball in his yard
and around. Philip talked with the current owners of the house he grew up
in; his high school had some magnificent WPA mural work, some by somebody
semi-famous (whom I've forgotten). At the gathering in that old high school
auditorium to honor him, he said, "This is my Swedish Academy."



The only one of two writers I've ever written. I got a response. I
told him *When
She Was Good* changed my life. He wrote "I hope for the better!" and I felt
his eyes twinkling. (Now he cannot get the next letter I have been
procrastinating on writing FOR YEARS! About how his late novel character
discovering Russell's *Why I Am Not a Christian *upended my teenage very
Catholic mind and was a perfect choice for the time of the novel, of
course.



I told him how I defended* Sabbath's Theater* within my circle, such as it
was, a few folks, as so many dissed him for it, demonic and dirty and
perverse and all. Look up the frozen ice and axe quote again, from one of
his faves, Kafka, I would say now.


He riffed on his belief in the decline of novel reading and said people
like me were to be commended (he knew I was in the book business, in sales)



He used to shop at the first bookstore I managed in Connecticut. Came in
then with the woman he dedicated The Professor of Desire to, I'm sure...the
novel in which the ending of desire surfaces overtly. I have another
self-serving story---how he wanted me to bring in his good friend Richard
Stern's new novel and I told him we had it and I knew who he was and I put
the novel on a table. He always smiled and nodded when he came in after
that.



I remember him buying Arendt's *Men in Dark Times. *



a terrif critic: who else would have called Le Carre's *A Perfect Spy *the
most perfect--and best-- British novel of it's time?


And *Letting Go, *read twice before I was 25 (instead of James) also
changed my life.


The greater books showed me life and wit and obsession and so much else.