Tag: Philip Roth

Pynchon in French and Ballard’s Creation, Krilanovich’s Acid, Shaky Knees, beat by weather etc.

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Any time I visit Atlanta, I have to stop by A Capella Books. I walked down there from Little Five Points, where my wife and son were still looking around. I have never seen L5P so busy, thick with hipsters young and old and even older who were killing hours, like we were, I suppose, before the first set of bands that night at the Shaky Knees festival in Piedmont Park. A Capella was pleasantly empty, for the most part.

I picked up a first American edition of J.G. Ballard’s 1987 novel The Day of Creation. Not Ballard’s finest, not his worst; the collector in me thought it should go home with me.

After some downtime at a rental we walked to Piedmont Park for the first night of Shaky Knees, an outdoor music festival featuring four stages in the sweltering swooning swanning sauna September heat. I am very much not a Music Festival Guy, but I wanted to see some of the bands in this year’s lineup, and my son wanted to see even more of the bands — so we made a family trip of it.

We arrived not quite an hour before the psyop (?) indie sensation Geese were to start their set. A band called Hot Mulligan were playing; I had tried to listen to a little bit of their music on the drive up to Atlanta (I did this for pretty much all the bands I hadn’t heard before), and it was decidedly Not For Me. I did like their live sound though, and especially the singer’s charisma. Oh who the fuck am I kidding — I guess he really just won me over when he implored the crowd to “Boo the VIP section!” (Shaky Knees, like every other thing in America right now, is a capitalist swine scam: shaded areas barricaded off for the richies to rest, covered stadium seating for the very rich richies to enjoy their punk-indie-etc., $35 margaritas, a little village of “brand partner experiences” where you could, if you were so stupidly inclined, take pictures in front of a Sierra Nevada “immersion room.” So fuckin punk!). Anyway, speaking of rich kids–

I tried to watch the band Geese with an open mind. My son likes their record and he generally has good taste. The crowd seemed to like what they were doing, which was really just a shoddy whiny blues-rock thing expressed in impoverished chords. One of the guitar players was wearing a Melt Banana t-shirt. I opened for Melt Banana at a record store in like 1999 or 2000, a piece of information that dramatically drove up my esteem in my son’s eyes. I thought Geese were genuinely bad at playing their instruments, their songs were boring, and, worst of all, their guitar tone was terrible.

Luckily Danny Elfman played next. For some reason, this legend was consigned to the smallest stage at the festival, tucked back in the hills of the park (I would see Geordie Greep there later, as well as some of the Bone Thugs-n-Harmony set). Elfman plays a lot of Oingo Boingo songs mixed in with some of the greatest hits of his scores. He plays with a full rock band, orchestra, and choir. It’s totally fucked up and amazing. If there had been a roof over the park it would’ve exploded when they played “This Is Halloween”; what’s left of the metaphorical roof would have disintegrated during The Simpsons theme. I am not, like, a Danny Elfman fan–but I guess I’m Gen X or whatever, and I suppose I really enjoy weird but very accomplished musicianship. Also, Danny Elfman is like 73 and totally jacked. (Google him.)

We caught the end of Fontaines D.C. (great show from a band I didn’t really care about) and then (speaking of rich kids), watched headliners The Strokes. I was impressed by their show — they seemed to understand the assignment and Played the Hits and Mostly That First Album.

Geordie Greep shreddin'.
Geordie Greep shreddin’.

Next day, Saturday, was generally a weaker lineup, but it featured the two acts I most wanted to see: Geordie Greep and Pavement. I’d caught Greep last week in Jacksonville, a show I didn’t know was going to happen back when I bought the Shaky tickets. Both shows were excellent. If you don’t know Greep’s stuff, it’s kinda like Zappa or King Crimson with the horny Philip-Roth-persona lyrics delivered in a crooning but theatrical style, a mix of David Lee Roth and Meat Loaf. His album The New Sound was my favorite of 2024 and pretty much everyone I’ve tried to play it for has hated it, other than my son. The day was blazing, so we scooted back to the rental, rested, and returned for Blood Orange. Their set started great but was then interrupted by lightning and thunder and then a torrential downpour and an evacuation of the park. No Pavement for your boy! I got beat by weather.

I consoled myself with recollecting the show I saw back in, what was it, ’95, ’96, with Royal Trux opening? They were fucking terrible at that show. We trudged home in inches of thick gross water. I watched the Florida-Auburn game on my laptop, another consolation. (Feed my thrill.)

We spent too much of Sunday at Piedmont Park. I think there were like 50,000 people there. It was Hot as Fuck. I was impressed by Santigold’s set, which was high energy despite the astounding, oppressive heat. My son was looking forward to Modest Mouse and was disappointed, much as I had been disappointed way back in, what was it, ’98, ’99 when I first saw them shit the bed in a boozy concert in Gainesville? (I should disclose that their front man later lived down the street from me for a season and was a notorious total dick to everyone in the scene and generally thought he was like, too cool for school I guess.) They sounded thin and unenthusiastic.

Wu-Tang Clan were unexpectedly fantastic — I mean, I love those early albums, but I honestly expected them to phone it in, but they played all the “hits” with enthusiasm and energy. LCD Soundsystem turned out to be the highlight of the festival. I’ve loved some of their tracks over the years, but soured on the band when they made an enormous fuckin’ deal about disbanding (I mean they made a film about it!) only to reunite — but they were great. I’m generally ambivalent about headliners Gorillaz, but they sounded great, played all the hits, and had an impressive roster of features show up in person, including Del the Funky Homosapien, who capped the festival with a rousing rendition of “Clint Eastwood.”

Unable to sleep, my ears ringing, I finished the novel I’d been reading on the trip,Grace Krilanovich’s Acid Green Velvet. This is a novel about hoboes, grifters, yeggs, anarchists, socialists, cults and movements and capital and anti-capital. It takes place in some alternate version of the end of the nineteenth century, in some alternate California. Acid Green Velvet is surreal and sinister and funny and sexy and gross; it’s part horror, part social satire, part historical thriller, part part part part part…Look, I loved this novel, Acid Green Velvet. Maybe fifty, sixty pages in it really sank into me, or I really sank into it. It reminds me strongly of Thomas Pynchon’s work, particularly Against the Day, with which it shares many themes and motifs, as well as Slothrop’s toilet adventures in Gravity’s Rainbow (it’s, uh, abject). It’s not just the themes, but also the oblique, layered, surrealistic/mystical style of Krilanovich’s prose that recalls Pynchon’s style. Her approach is, to be clear, in no way an imitation or approximation, but rather blood that flows from the same vein. (The phrase against the day pops up late in the novel, by the way.) Proper review to come.

And more Pynchon:

When I got back home, I had a package from Paris — Nicolas Richard’s new French translation of Pynchon’s latest novel Shadow Ticket:

Nicolas got in touch with me early last year, and we corresponded for a few months about the novel. Answering his questions and trying out some of his phrasing was some of the most fun I’ve had in years. It was like reading the novel again through different eyes, different ears. Nicolas was kind enough to include me in his acknowledgements, which is one of the biggest little thrills of my life:

Let me tell you about the nap

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2025 was in several ways one of the more fucked up and challenging years of my life. (This sentiment might be familiar to you and yours and many others.) But it was the year I finally learned to take a nap, thanks in part to an anecdote shared by the late novelist Philip Roth.

I have always been jealous of folks who can sleep on planes, in cars, on buses and far more jealous of people who can, like, choose to take a nap. I have envied people like my wife or my daughter or son or brother, who can just, like, conk out for twenty minutes and arise revived. It’s hard enough for me to fall asleep for six or seven or eight hours. As a child I remember reading that Napoleon Bonaparte was very good at taking cat naps, particularly before battles. I don’t know why but this factoid, true or false, made a huge impression on me as a kid. Napping has always seemed like a hidden key to focusing one’s energies.

I couldn’t nap but I was great at staying up for days at a time, particularly in my twenties. I also learned how to make my mind stop, to shut the whole thing down, but that wasn’t napping; it was passing out. None of this was or is healthy behavior.

Late last year a good friend of mine told me he’d picked up most of Philip Roth’s novels at an estate sale or a garage sale or some such. He’d been zipping through them and What do you think of Roth? he asked and I replied something like, I tried — it was Portnoy’s Complaint which I lifted from the Barnes & Noble when I was fifteen and then a few years later the first fifty pages of American Pastoral and all of The Human Stain and then giving up on The Plot Against America. And that was more or less it.

But maybe a year or two before this friend recommended my trying Roth, I’d read on the goddamned website Twitter an excerpt from a Philip Roth interview that stuck with me, primarily because of my desire to become a napper. It was a little screenshot, an excerpt from a 2013 puff piece with NPR celebrating Roth’s becoming an octogenarian. Here is the nap nugget:

Now that he’s not working every day, though, Roth says he’s savoring a gentler pleasure: naps. “Let me tell you about the nap,” he laughs. “It’s absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man, and he said to me, I was maybe 9, and he said to me, ‘Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off, put a blanket on you, and you’re going to sleep better.’ Well, as with everything, he was right. … Then the best part of it is that when you wake up, for the first 15 seconds, you have no idea where you are. You’re just alive. That’s all you know. And it’s bliss, it’s absolute bliss.”

My friend’s recommendation to return to Roth recalled this bit of advice and I started to practice it this year, now in my late forties. It has worked for me (or maybe my body has just gotten so old that all the cells and systems and such have agreed to allow consciousness to pause for twenty minutes on a Thursday afternoon). I think Roth’s dad’s advice works because it involves a commitment to the nap. Natural nappers like my lovely wife can shut it down on a couch with the second half of Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 adaptation of Little Women on the teevee, or drift off for a postprandial half-time siesta like an uncle after some ham and turkey and Pinot noir. Natural nappers are blessed; some of us have to work for it though.

I’ve added a few moves to Roth’s simple repertoire — shutting the door, closing the blinds, putting my phone in a different room. The hardest bit though, at first, was consciousness itself, some parcel of images and words and sounds intervening in blips in my mind’s eye when I tried to shut it all down. I remember as a kid being told to count sheep, or count numbers, to visualize the sheep or the numbers.

This bad count the sheep advice led me to realize that my mind stacks images on each other; or, not really stacks images so much as holds images — that when I’m not focused on external sensory input, like, when I’m supposed to be turning off, going to sleep, my mind’s eye (for lack of a better metaphor) has decided to rustle through my imagination and memory to layer visual (and to a much lesser extent, auditory) sensations in thick bundles. My trick this year has been to relax into the image bundle without attempting to make it cohere; I try to feel the blanket on my skin. I think I’ve gotten better at breathing, too.

I like napping. I have taken it up as a midlife hobby. It has made my life better in exactly the kind of way I had hoped it would — a small, minor, gift I thought would never be mine. Maybe I’ll even reach that bliss Roth mentions. But I’m fine without it.

Philip Roth on Franz Kafka

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I am looking, as I write of Kafka, at the photograph taken of him at the age of forty (my age)—it is 1924, as sweet and hopeful a year as he may ever have known as a man, and the year of his death.His face is sharp and skeletal, a burrower’s face:pronounced cheekbones made even more conspicuous by the absence of sideburns; the ears shaped and angled on his head like angel wings; an intense, creaturely gaze of startled composure—enormous fears, enormous control; a black towel of Levantine hair pulled close around the skull the only sensuous feature; there is a familiar Jewish flare in the bridge of the nose, the nose itself is long and weighted slightly at the tip—the nose of half the Jewish boys who were my friends in high school.Skulls chiseled like this one were shoveled by the thousands from the ovens; had he lived, his would have been among them, along with the skulls of his three younger sisters.

Of course, it is no more horrifying to think of Franz Kafka in Auschwitz than to think of anyone in Auschwitz—it is just horrifying in its own way.But he died too soon for the holocaust.Had he lived, perhaps he would have escaped with his good friend Max Brod, who found refuge in Palestine, a citizen of Israel until his death there in 1968.But Kafka escaping?It seems unlikely for one so fascinated by entrapment and careers that culminate in anguished death.Still, there is Karl Rossmann, his American greenhorn.Having imagined Karl’s escape to America and his mixed luck here, could not Kafka have found a way to execute an escape for himself?The New School for Social Research in New York becoming his Great Nature Theatre of Oklahoma?Or perhaps, through the influence of Thomas Mann, a position in the German department at Princeton … But then, had Kafka lived, it is not at all certain that the books of his which Mann celebrated from his refuge in New Jersey would ever have been published; eventually Kafka might either have destroyed those manuscripts that he had once bid Max Brod to dispose of at his death or, at the least, continued to keep them his secret.The Jewish refugee arriving in America in 1938 would not then have been Mann’s “religious humorist” but a frail and bookish fifty-five-year-old bachelor, formerly a lawyer for a government insurance firm in Prague, retired on a pension in Berlin at the time of Hitler’s rise to power—an author, yes, but of a few eccentric stories, mostly about animals, stories no one in America had ever heard of and only a handful in Europe had read; a homeless K., but without K.’s willfulness and purpose, a homeless Karl, but without Karl’s youthful spirit and resilience; just a Jew lucky enough to have escaped with his life, in his possession a suitcase containing some clothes, some family photos, some Prague mementos, and the manuscripts, still unpublished and in pieces, of Amerika, The Trial, The Castle, and (stranger things happen) three more fragmented novels, no less remarkable than the bizarre masterworks that he keeps to himself out of oedipal timidity, perfectionist madness, and insatiable longings for solitude and spiritual purity.

–From Philip Roth’s essay “ ‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka.” Read the entire essay.

 

“When the Whole World Doesn’t Believe in God, It’ll Be a Great Place” — Philip Roth

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“I Don’t Have a Religious Bone in My Body” — Philip Roth on Religion and God

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“I Don’t Feel Any Wiser” — Philip Roth on the Myths of Aging

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“I Finally Got Tired of Being Angry at Roth” — What Jonathan Franzen’s Been Reading

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Time profiles Jonathan Franzen this week (part of the push for his new novel Freedom, out later this month). Franzen also talks about five works that have “inspired him recently.” Here are his comments on those books–

The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal

Instead of sitting for years at his writing desk, pulling his hair, Stendhal served with the French diplomatic corps in his favorite country, Italy, and then came home and dictated his novel in less than eight weeks: what a great model for how to be a writer and still have some kind of life! The book is at once deeply cynical and hopelessly romantic, all about politics but also all about love, and just about impossible to put down.

The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley

There’s nothing fancy about the writing in Smiley’s masterpiece, and yet every sentence of its eight hundred pages is clean and necessary. For the two weeks it took me to read it, I didn’t want to be anywhere else but in late-medieval Greenland, following the passions and feuds and farming crises of European settlers trying to survive in the face of ecological doom. It all felt weirdly and plausibly contemporary.
Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth

I finally got tired of being angry at Roth for his self-indulgent excesses and weak dialogue and thin female characters and decided to open myself to his genius for invention and his heroic lack of shame. Whole chunks of Sabbath’s Theater can be safely skipped, but the great stuff is truly great: the scene in which Mickey Sabbath panhandles on the New York with a paper coffee cup, for example, or the scene in which Sabbath’s best friend catches him relaxing in the bathtub and fondling his (the friend’s) young daughter’s underpants.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Wharton’s male characters suffer from some of the deficiencies that Roth’s female characters do, but the heroine of House of Mirth, Lily Bart, is one of the great characters in American literature, a pretty and smart but impecunious New York society woman who can’t quite pull the trigger on marrying for money. Wharton’s love for Lily is equal to the cruelty that Wharton’s story relentlessly inflicts on her; and so we recognize our entire selves in her.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

A lifelong heavy drinker with his most famous novel well behind him, Steinbeck set out to write a mythic version of his family’s American experience that would embody the whole story of our country’s lost innocence and possible redemption. There are infelicities on almost every page, and the fact that the book succeeds brilliantly anyway is a testament to the power of Steinbeck’s storytelling: to his ferocious will to make sense of his life and his country.

Paul Auster Explains Why Philip Roth Is Wrong

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Paul Auster explains why Philip Roth is wrong about the death of the novel:

Hoax, Italian Style

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In this week’s issue of The New Yorker Judith Thurman reports on the literary hoaxes of Tommaso Debenedetti, an Italian “journalist” who has apparently fabricated dozens of interviews with famous authors in the paper Il Piccolo. Authors–so far–include Philip Roth, John Grisham, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, Herta Müller, Nadine Gordimer (Thurman is continuing to investigate Debedenetti’s archival interviews).

Thurman contacted Debenedetti, who denied that he faked the interviews. From the article:

Debenedetti said he was completely “shocked and saddened” that all these writers would have denied the veracity of his reporting. When I asked him about the interviews with Roth and Grisham, he flatly denied having invented them, and told me that Roth and Grisham were lying for “political” reasons—because their views on Obama would make them unpopular with left-leaning intellectuals. Roth, he added, might have decided that it was impolitic to express hostility toward Obama because it might spoil his chances for the Nobel.

I then read the list of other writers who had denied or questioned his conversations with them. In every case, Debenedetti asserted that he had invented nothing. When I asked if he could produce any recordings or notes from his interviews, he laughed and, admitting that it sounded like a “tired” excuse, told me that he had lost the tapes in some cases, and in others had “thrown them away.”

The Anxiety of Influence

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In her essay “The Naked and the Conflicted,” published in today’s New York Times, Katie Roiphe suggests that “we are awfully cavalier about the Great Male Novelists of the last century. It has become popular to denounce those authors, and more particularly to deride the sex scenes in their novels.” By the Great Male Novelists she is, of course, referring to Norman Mailer, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow. She continues: “Even the young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be the heirs apparent have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors.” Roiphe picks a relatively slim sample of “young male writers” to prove her thesis, including David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, and Jonathan Franzen. Slim sample, but still, quite representative. Her big claim: “The younger writers are so self-­conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex.” Hmmm . . . Perhaps. Makes us think about how writers like Dennis Cooper, Wells Tower, Junot Díaz, or Stephen Elliott might fit into this scheme . . .