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“... if you remove the line breaks; a recipient of literary prizes second only to his former friend Philip Roth (their bond went cold after Updike wrote about Roth’s ex-wife Claire Bloom’s memoir). After he killed off Harry Angstrom in 1990 with Rabbit at Rest, his reputation suffered. Unlike ...”

“... bloggers clamoured to interview and in some cases canonise her. Heti has been called the heir to Philip Roth, or to Joan Didion, and the literary equivalent of the filmmaker Lena Dunham or the songwriter Frank Ocean, who astonished the luridly heterosexual R’n’B scene last year by recording love songs addressed to his boyfriend. But what if she’d ...”

“... The last letter​ Philip Larkin wrote was to Kingsley Amis on 21 November 1985. He was too ill to hold the pen himself and dictated it to be typed and signed by his secretary at the Brynmor Jones Library in Hull. He told Amis he was going into hospital that day for more tests – ‘only tests, but of course they are looking for something, and I bloody well hope they don’t find it ...”

“... opportunity was offered me – to do some research work for a soc[iology] instructor named Philip Rieff, who is working on, among other things, a reader in the sociology of politics + religion. At last the chance to really involve myself in one area with competent guidance. 12/2/49 Last night, or was it early this (Sat.) morning? – I am engaged to ...”

“... anything that looks like being a success, in much the same way that Patrick Hamilton’s did. When Philip Roth was selling his millions, and explicit sex was all the rage, Updike competed with Couples, which failed by exaggerating and specialising his natural sense of things, in all the senses of that ancient and convenient word. Things and short stories ...”

“... for American writers who prefer the national mannerism of the barbaric yawp. Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Rush are exact contemporaries, born in 1933. McCarthy excels at antique dialogue and rapturous word-pictures of frontier landscapes; likes to portray violence; won’t represent thought; can’t do women; and has denounced Henry James and the ...”

“... even ‘blooming’. Late in his life he made a close connection with Philip Roth, who said of him after their first meeting that his much admired colleague struck him as ‘a free and lively spirit’. ‘I got him completely wrong,’ he then added. Not quite: when Levi was not in the grip of depression he was the man that ...”

“... and author of The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. Tarnower at home might have been invented by Philip Roth, as an honorary member of the Tarnopol or Zuckerman families, the one who makes good, along slightly crossed tribal lines. With his Japanese-style suburban estate, his disaffected Belgian houseman, his appreciation of women half his age, his ...”

“... of Retribution’ can vie for dramatic horror with the images from Abu Ghraib, and so the old Philip Roth line – that American reality will outstrip anything the novelist may imagine – is borne out once more. As a result, this whole section seems not just pallid and unadventurous but insufficiently novelistic. It brings a kind of ‘news’ that ...”

“... I am nearly opposite in my tastes, but we did share our enthusiasms. Thom, for instance, thought Philip Roth was the cat’s miaow. I didn’t. ‘Try The Counterlife,’ Thom said. Which I did, and it dazzled me. Another time Thom said to me, ‘I’ve been reading Isaac Babel for the first time. He’s very important to you, isn’t he? Well, of ...”

“... history (even though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come in the reversals of ...”

“... mystery how they are going to deal with the problems we now know they have. To tweak a thought by Philip Roth, the mystery of the man who doesn’t know he is set up for mystery – that is every man’s mystery. The many mysteries boil down to three. There is the kind that can be solved: who planted the bomb? Will the travellers reach their ...”

“... I commented. A student in my seminar on confession – very PC – turned in a paper (on Philip Roth) that began: ‘Every mother wants what’s best for his or her son.’ ‘This is so wrong and on so many levels,’ I wrote, ‘that I don’t even know where to begin.’ As you can tell, then, my main way of dealing with this ridiculous ...”

“... was to throw a shovel of dirt onto the coffin. The family went first, using the shovel, then came Philip Roth, who threw the soil into the grave with his hands. Almost everyone else went up to pick up the shovel. ‘What was remarkable,’ my friend said, ‘was that one was reminded of the sheer labour it takes to replace all that soil. For half an ...”

“... nature of literary truth. That’s the excuse, anyway. For a while in the 1980s it looked as if Philip Roth would never recover from this syndrome, this affliction of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a ...”