End of the Road

Philip Roth has announced that he's retiring from writing novels.  Normally, this type of announcement would fill me with utmost sadness and despair at the prospect of yet another artist I love ceasing to produce new works.  With Roth, though, I think the writing has been on the wall for quite some time.  His output over the last few decades has been some of his most highly praised of his career, but I've found much of it to be redundant, repetitive and wholly lacking anything new to say about the human condition.

Roth has spent much of this period writing an extended eulogy of sorts for many of his characters and in many ways seems to be mirroring his own life as it winds down into the twilight.  Any sympathy one might have for these characters as they enter their final days is extinguished, however, by the fact that much of their time is spent on bizarre recollections of sexual conquests past and present and rings untrue.  I've written about my disappointment in Roth before and this holds true now that I know that these last few novels, or novellas to be more exact, are now serving as the coda to a long career that has produced some incredibly beautiful writing.

Human sexuality is certainly a fact of life and one that I accept as being a necessary component to the arts, but Roth's obsessions, for they truly are his when one considers the fact that most if not all of his characters are extensions of their creator, truly ruin what could be seen as a very provocative, thoughtful rumination on the end of one's days.  Characters reflecting on the intellectual aspects of existence are much more interesting to ponder than any graphic description of oral sex.  Roth is a classicist in the truest sense.  He's steeped in the greatest works ever produced, so it's doubly baffling that he would choose to totally ignore these influences in favor of whipping a already dead horse.

I'm sad to see someone like Roth give up on the novel, because he's certainly got the skills to produce tremendous work, but if he doesn't have anything to say or is incapable of saying anything new about the human condition, perhaps it's best that he does throw in the towel.