{"product_id":"reading-myself-and-others-isbn-9780679749073","title":"Reading Myself and Others","description":"\u003cb\u003eFascinating   interviews, essays, and articles spanning a quarter century on writing,   baseball, American fiction, and American Jews—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning   author of \u003ci\u003eAmerican Pastoral\u003c\/i\u003e and one of the greatest writers of the 20th   century.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"An illuminating...glimpse of the theory and practice that have made Roth a major figure in American fiction.\" —\u003ci\u003eChicago Daily News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Here is Philip Roth on himself and his work and the controversies it's   engendered. Here too are Roth's writings on the Eastern European writers he   has always championed, and so much more. The essential collection of   nonfiction by a true American master, \u003ci\u003eReading Myself and Others\u003c\/i\u003e features his famed long interview with the \u003ci\u003eParis Review\u003c\/i\u003e. | \"An illuminating ... glimpse of the theory and practice that have made Roth a major   figure in American fiction.... Reveals a first-rate mind.\" \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eChicago Daily News\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Excellent.... Roth's sensitivity to the balance of situations in   his own fiction is Jamesian in its subtlety, and indeed in its nature this book is   closer to James's prefaces than to any other book ... consistently thoughtful and thoroughly   engaging.\" \u003cb\u003e—Larry McMurtry, \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Roth [is] fearless in his own defense and in defense of literature.\"\u003cb\u003e —Michael Mewshaw, \u003ci\u003eTexas Monthly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e | PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for \u003ci\u003eAmerican Pastoral\u003c\/i\u003e. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ethe White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eAcademy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction.\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eHe twice won the National Book Award and the National\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eBook Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN\/Faulkner\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eAward three times. In 2005 \u003ci\u003eThe Plot Against America \u003c\/i\u003ereceived\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ethe Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ehistorical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.”\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eRoth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards:\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ein 2006 the PEN\/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN\/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eMedal at the White House, and was later named the fourth\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003erecipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018. | One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Writing and the Powers That Be\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Tell us first of all about your adolescence-its   relationship with the type of American society you have represented in Goodbye, Columbus;   your rapport with your family; and if and how you felt the weight of paternal power.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e An interview conducted by the Italian critic Walter Mauro, for his collection of   interviews with writers on the subject of power. (1974)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Far from being the classic   period of explosion and tempestuous growth, my adolescence was more or less a period   of suspended animation. After the victories of an exuberant and spirited childhood-lived   out against the dramatic background of America's participation in World War II-I   was to cool down considerably until I went off to college in 1950. There, in a respectable   Christian atmosphere hardly less constraining than my own particular Jewish upbringing,   but whose strictures I could ignore or oppose without feeling bedeviled by long-standing   loyalties, I was able to reactivate a taste for inquiry and speculation that had   been all but immobilized during my high school years. From age twelve, when I entered   high school, to age sixteen, when I graduated, I was by and large a good, responsible,   well-behaved boy, controlled (rather willingly) by the social regulations of the   self-conscious and orderly lower-middle-class neighborhood where I had been raised,   and mildly constrained still by the taboos that had filtered down to me, in attenuated   form, from the religious orthodoxy of my immigrant grandparents. I was probably a   \"good\" adolescent partly because I understood that in our Jewish section of Newark   there was nothing much else to be, unless I wanted to steal cars or flunk courses,   both of which proved to be beyond me. Rather than becoming a sullen malcontent or   a screaming rebel-or flowering, as I had in the prelapsarian days at elementary school-I   obediently served my time in what was, after all, only a minimum-security institution,   and enjoyed the latitude and privileges awarded to the inmates who make no trouble   for their guards.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The best of adolescence was the intense male friendships-not   only because of the cozy feelings of camaraderie they afforded boys coming unstuck   from their close-knit families, but because of the opportunity they provided for   uncensored talk. These marathon conversations, characterized often by raucous discussions   of hoped-for sexual adventure and by all sorts of anarchic joking, were typically   conducted, however, in the confines of a parked car-two, three, four, or five of   us in a single steel enclosure just about the size and shape of a prison cell, and   similarly set apart from ordinary human society.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Still, the greatest freedom and   pleasure I knew in those years may have derived from what we said to one another   for hours on end in those automobiles. And how we said it. My closest adolescent   companions-clever, respectful Jewish boys like myself, all four of whom have gone   on to be successful doctors-may not look back in the same way on those bull sessions,   but for my part I associate that amalgam of mimicry, reporting, kibbitzing, disputation,   satire, and legendizing from which we drew so much sustenance with the work I now   do, and I consider what we came up with to amuse one another in those cars to have   been something like the folk narrative of a tribe passing from one stage of human   development to the next. Also, those millions of words were the means by which we   either took vengeance on or tried to hold at bay the cultural forces that were shaping   us. Instead of stealing cars from strangers, we sat in the cars we had borrowed from   our fathers and said the wildest things imaginable, at least in our neighborhood.   Which is where we were parked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"The weight of paternal power,\" in its traditional   oppressive or restraining guises, was something I had hardly to contend with in adolescence.   My father had little aside from peccadilloes to quarrel with me about, and if anything   weighed upon me, it was not dogmatism, unswervingness, or the like, but his limitless   pride in me. When I tried not to disappoint him, or my mother, it was never out of   fear of the mailed fist or the punitive decree, but of the broken heart; even in   post-adolescence, when I began to find reasons to oppose them, it never occurred   to me that as a consequence I might lose their love.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e What may have encouraged my   cooling down in adolescence was the grave financial setback my father suffered at   about the time I was entering high school. The struggle back to solvency was arduous,   and the stubborn determination and reserves of strength that it called forth from   him in his mid-forties made him all at once a figure of considerable pathos and heroism   in my eyes, a cross of a kind between Captain Ahab and Willy Loman. Half-consciously   I wondered if he might not collapse, carrying us under with him-instead he proved   to be undiscourageable, if not something of a stone wall. But as the outcome was   in doubt precisely during my early adolescence, it could be that my way in those   years of being neither much more nor much less than \"good\" had to do with contributing   what I could to family order and stability. To allow paternal power to weigh what   it should, I would postpone until a later date the resumption of my career as classroom   conquistador, and suppress for the duration all rebellious and heretical inclinations   . . . This is largely a matter of psychological conjecture, of course, certainly   so by this late date-but the fact remains that I did little in adolescence to upset   whatever balance of power had enabled our family to come as far as it had and to   work as well as it did.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Sex as an instrument of power and subjection. You develop   this theme in Portnoy's Complaint and achieve a desecration of pornography, at the   same time recognizing the obsessive character of sexual concerns and their enormous   conditioning power. Tell us in what real experience this dramatic fable originated   or from what adventure of the mind or the imagination.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Do I \"achieve a desecration   of pornography\"? I never thought of it that way before, since generally pornography   is itself considered a verbal desecration of the acts by which men and women are   imagined to consecrate their profound attachment to one another. Actually I think   of pornography more as the projection of an altogether human preoccupation with the   genitalia in and of them-\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e selves-a preoccupation excluding all emotions other than   those elemental feelings that the contemplation of genital functions arouses. Pornography   is to the whole domain of sexual relations what a building manual is to hearth and   home. Or so it would be, if carpentry were surrounded with the exciting aura of magic,   mystery, and breachable taboo that adheres at this moment to the range of sex acts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I don't think that I \"desecrated\" pornography but, rather, excised its central   obsession with the body as an erotic contraption or plaything-with orifices, secretions,   tumescence, friction, discharge, and all the abstruse intricacies of sex-tectonics-and   then placed that obsession back into an utterly mundane family setting, where issues   of power and subjection, among other things, can be seen in their broad everyday   aspect rather than through the narrowing lens of pornography. Now, perhaps it is   just in this sense that I could be charged with having desecrated, or profaned, what   pornography, by its exclusiveness and obsessiveness, does actually elevate into a   kind of sacred, all-encompassing religion, whose solemn rites it ritualistically   enacts: the religion of Fuckism (or, in a movie like Deep Throat, Suckism). As in   any religion these devotions are a matter of the utmost seriousness, and there is   little more room for individual expressiveness or idiosyncrasy, for human error or   mishap, than there is in the celebration of the Mass. In fact, the comedy of Portnoy's   Complaint arises largely out of the mishaps, wholly expressive of the individual,   that bedevil one would-be celebrant as he tries desperately to make his way to the   altar and remove his clothes. All his attempts to enter naked into the sacred realm   of pornography are repeatedly foiled because, by his own definition, Alexander Portnoy   is a character in a Jewish joke-a genre which, unlike pornography, pictures a wholly   deconsecrated world: demystified, deromanticized, utterly dedeluded. Fervent religionist   that he would be, Portnoy still cannot help but profane with his every word and gesture   what the orthodox Fuckist most reveres.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I cannot track down for you any single   experience, whether of the mind or the body, from which Portnoy's Complaint originated.   Perhaps what you want to know is whether I have firsthand knowledge of \"sex as an   instrument of power and subjection.\" The answer is, how could I not? I too have appetite,   genitals, imagination, drive, inhibition, frailties, will, and conscience. Moreover,   the massive, late-sixties assault upon sexual customs came nearly twenty years after   I myself hit the beach and began fighting for a foothold on the erotic homeland held   in subjugation by the enemy. I sometimes think of my generation of men as the first   wave of determined D-day invaders, over whose bloody, wounded carcasses the flower   children subsequently stepped ashore to advance triumphantly toward that libidinous   Paris we had dreamed of liberating as we inched inland on our bellies, firing into   the dark. \"Daddy,\" the youngsters ask, \"what did you do in the war?\" I humbly submit   they could do worse than read Portnoy's Complaint to find out.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The relationship   in your work between reality and imagination. Have the forms of power we have mentioned   (family, religion, politics) influenced your style, your mode of expression? Or has   writing served increasingly to free you from these forms of power?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Inasmuch as   subject might be considered an aspect of \"style,\" the answer to the first question   is yes: family and religion as coercive forces have been a recurrent subject in my   fiction, particularly in the work up to and including Portnoy's Complaint; and the   coercive appetites of the Nixon Administration were very much to the point of Our   Gang. Of course the subjects themselves \"influence\" their treatment and my \"mode   of expression,\" but so does much else. Certainly, aside from the Nixon satire, I   have never written anything determinedly and intentionally destructive. Polemical   or blasphemous assault upon the powers that be has served me more as a theme than   as an overriding purpose in my work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"The Conversion of the Jews,\" for instance,   a story I wrote when I was twenty-three, reveals at its most innocent stage of development   a budding concern with the oppressiveness of family feeling and with the binding   ideas of religious exclusiveness which I had experienced first-hand in ordinary American-Jewish   life. A good boy named Freedman brings to his knees a bad rabbi named Binder (and   various other overlords) and then takes wing from the synagogue into the vastness   of space. Primitive as this story seems to me now-it might better be called a daydream-it   nonetheless evolved out of the same preoccupations that led me, years later, to invent   Alexander Portnoy, an older incarnation of claustrophobic little Freedman, who cannot   cut loose from what binds and inhibits him quite so magically as the hero I imagined   humbling his mother and his rabbi in \"The Conversion of the Jews.\" Ironically, where   the boy in the early story is subjugated by figures of real stature in his world,   whose power he for the moment at least is able to subvert, Portnoy is less oppressed   by these people-who have little real say in his life anyway-than he is imprisoned   by the rage that persists against them. That his most powerful oppressor by far is   himself is what makes for the farcical pathos of the book-and also what connects   it with my preceding novel, When She Was Good, where again the focus is on a grown   child's fury against long-standing authorities believed by her to have misused their   power.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The question of whether I can ever free myself from these forms of power   assumes that I experience family and religion as power and nothing else. It is much   more complicated than that. I have never really tried, through my work or directly   in my life, to sever all that binds me to the world I came out of. I am probably   right now as devoted to my origins as I ever was in the days when I was indeed as   powerless as little Freedman and, more or less, had no other sane choice. But this   has come about only after subjecting these ties and connections to considerable scrutiny.   In fact, the affinities that I continue to feel toward the forces that first shaped   me, having withstood to the degree that they have the assault of imagination and   the test of sustained psychoanalysis (with all the cold-bloodedness that entails),   would seem by now to be here to stay. Of course I have greatly refashioned my attachments   through the effort of testing them, and over the years have developed my strongest   attachment to the test itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Our Gang is a desecration of President Nixon and   it takes its theme from a statement on abortion. In what period of your life have   you most strongly felt the weight of political power as a moral coercion and how   did you react to it? Do you feel that the element of the grotesque, which you often   use, is the only means by which one can rebel and fight against such power?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I suppose   I most strongly felt political power as moral coercion while growing up in New Jersey   during World War II. Little was asked of an American schoolchild, other than his   belief in the \"war effort,\" but that I gave with all my heart. I worried over the   welfare of older cousins who were off in the war zone, and wrote them long \"newsy\"   letters to keep up their morale; I sat by the radio with my parents listening to   Gabriel Heatter every Sunday, hoping upon hope that he had good news that night;   I followed the battle maps and front-line reports in the evening paper; and on weekends   I participated in the neighborhood collection of paper and tin cans. I was twelve   when the war ended, and during the next few years my first serious political allegiances   began to take shape. My entire clan-parents, aunts, uncles, cousins-were devout New   Deal Democrats. In part because they identified him with Roosevelt, and also because   they were by and large lower-middle-class people sympathetic to labor and the underdog,   many of them voted for Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate for President   in 1948. I'm proud to say that Richard Nixon was known as a crook in our kitchen   some twenty-odd years before this dawned on the majority of Americans as a real possibility.   I was in college during Joe McCarthy's heyday-which is when I began to identify political   power with immoral coercion. I reacted by campaigning for Adlai Stevenson and writing   a long angry free-verse poem about McCarthyism for the college literary magazine. | Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305197785317,"sku":"NP9780679749073","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780679749073.jpg?v=1767735450","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/reading-myself-and-others-isbn-9780679749073","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}