I can’t think of anybody I’d be more intimidated to interview than Philip Roth. He won the National Book Award at twenty-seven and later the Pulitzer; he has thirty books under his belt and has become throbbing heart of American literati.
I imagine Roth’s words pouring over me like lava: brilliant, fiery, and killing. But Scott Raab, interviewing Roth for Esquire about Roth’s new and thirty first book, Nemesis, treats the whole thing more like a hot potato – tossing Roth’s silences, sharp words and laconicism comically in the air, trying to not get burned and making us all laugh along the way.
Raab describes Roth “severely smart;” a man who “suffers fools badly,” and “parries, rather than answers, questions,” and then he punches the life of those descriptions with this: “I sneak one long sideways peak at his [Roth’s] nose: a classic Ashkenazi beak, scimitar of flesh, the sort of schnozzle that put the rhino in rhinoplasty.”
The majority of the interview takes place in a car. The two are driving to Roth’s childhood home, or, as Raab describes, “old Jewing grounds” in the Weequahic section of Newark. They come upon Philip Roth Plaza – which isn’t actually a plaza but a street corner. The street corner (in the way it falls short of a plaza) is a running theme throughout the interview – that Roth somehow hasn’t got all the attention and accolades he deserves. Namely, no Nobel.
They go to his childhood home, onto which is attached a plaque reading “Historic Site: Philip Roth Home.” Raab gives a couple great insights to Roth’s writing, but one that really struck me was the idea that Roth’s writing is something of an umbilical cord, bringing him back to this very house. “I had the rooms right in my imagination,” Roth says of his time writing Plot Against America, “and I had the scale right, and it was – there was just about twenty more coats of paint on the doors, but it was wonderful.”
Raab gives the reader some great biographical tidbits – Roth didn’t start writing stories until he was in the army – but to really get to know Roth, he advises: “Read the books. The Newark wiseacre spitting out novels like a bachelor-party stripper firing Ping-Pong balls out of her snatch is seventy-seven years old now. Behold a master, treasure his work, and shut the fuck up. Just read the books.”
The two seemed to have built a relationship in the course of the day. With similar bite to Raab’s advice, Roth’s final words to Raab concerning the article are: “Don’t fuck it up.”
