It’s too cold in Connecticut, says Philip Roth, explaining why he is to be found here, in the small, bare apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that functioned for decades as his studio and now – doubled in size by the addition of the next-door unit, but still small – is home. At 77, clear-eyed but slightly hobbling in his gait, the novelist’s days as a country gentleman are drawing to a close. Even walking the 50 metres from his studio to his house in the wooded hills became too much, he says. “I hated it.”
But there is another reason for his retreat, which comes out later in the course of a pleasant conversation that rambles from the struggles of writing to guilt, disease, fascism, fame and the cataclysms of fate. “All my friends have died,” he says.
Roth first fled the city in 1971, when he was 38, seeking to regain the anonymity he had lost with the success of a certain “sexually indiscreet book” – the notorious Portnoy’s Complaint, still the best known of the remarkable 31 titles listed at the front of his latest novel, Nemesis. “I went off to the country and in a certain way never returned,” he says. But now he has. His friends are dead. “And it’s hard to live up there,” he adds, his voice trailing off. “There’s enough solitude as it is.”
The walls are white and largely bare, with one exception, a framed map of Roth’s hometown of Newark, N.J., made in 1932, a year before his own birth. “It’s held up much better,” he says. But Roth denies any nostalgia for the town and the times he returns to again and again in his fiction, and once again in Nemesis. “I don’t want to live there,” he says, his eyes glittering almost black in frames of grey. “I don’t want it back.”
The author sinks gratefully into his favourite chair, a classic Eames lounger, the only piece of furniture in his apartment that is anything more than perfunctory, which he likes in part because of a matching ottoman that can double as a surface for stuff. Thus there is one Eames ottoman piled with papers by his knee and another, likewise burdened, sitting off in a nook by itself.
It is Tuesday, and in Stockholm senior functionaries of the Swedish Academy are proofreading their imminent announcement of the 2010 Nobel Prize for literature. But Roth, now a long-time favourite to win, routinely described as the greatest living novelist, is oblivious.
“I don’t care,” he says.
Not at all?
“I don’t care, no. I really don’t. I’ve won enough awards.”
He admits he would be a “happy dude” if he won. (In the event, this year’s Nobel went to Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru.) But then what? “Go to Sweden, make a speech, come home and get back to work.”
The work is incessant, compulsive. Nemesis is the last in a quartet of four short novels, now classified collectively as “Nemeses,” that Roth banged out so rapidly as to overtake the one-a-year schedule set by his publisher. He finished it more than a year ago, he explains, and had to reread the novel before venturing to discuss it with journalists. “I’ve been thinking about other things, you know.”
And writing constantly, eight hours a day, mainly sitting at a desk rather than standing full-time at a lectern as he once did, but always going. What he would like, Roth says, is to keep writing one long book till he died.
“That would be nice,” he says. “I would love to get a big idea and just keep writing until I left it unfinished. It would just go as long as I was breathing. But I don’t seem to be able to find it.”
