Philip Roth calls time on his literary career

The American novelist announces that Nemesis is his final novel.

The American website Salon has picked up on an interview that Philip Roth gave to the French magazine Les Inrocks last month in which the novelist declared that his literary career is at an end. Asked if he still had the desire to write, Roth replied: “To be honest with you, I’m done. Nemesis [the novel Roth published in 2010] will be my last book.” Roth told the interviewer that he hadn’t written anything for three years and had spent his time instead arranging his archive for his biographer Blake Bailey, who wrote a well-received biography of John Cheever. “I don’t want to write my memoirs,” he said. “But I wanted my biographer to have material for his book before my death.” Roth continued:

At 74, I realised I didn’t have a lot of time left, so I decided to re-read the novels I’d loved when I was 20 or 30 … Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Conrad, Hemingway … And when I’d finished I decided to re-read all my own books, starting at the end with Nemesis … I wanted to see if I’d wasted my time writing. And I thought it’d been more or less a success … I did the best I could have done with what I had.

Nemesis was reviewed in the NS by Leo Robson. “Ever since Goodbye, Columbus,” Robson wrote, “Roth has projected, and instilled, a sense of absolute confidence; a half-century on, his gift looks disturbingly like a knack. Nemesis is a forceful, exacting, even word-perfect novel, but it is also unadventurous, familiar, a little otiose – a work beyond the powers of most novelists but well within his.”

Roth’s previous novel, The Humbling, was treated much more harshly by NS editor Jason Cowley: “The latest product to roll out of the Philip Roth fiction factory is an old man’s masturbatory fantasy which, wrapped in a smart dust jacket, the equivalent of the pornographer’s brown paper bag, purports to be a novella of late-middle-aged existential crisis – at least during its more serious moments.”

More on Philip Roth in the New Statesman:

A S Byatt on Roth as “recorder of Darwinian Man”.
Frank Kermode declares, in a 2010 interview, that Roth is “writing some pretty bad books at the moment”.
Rick Gekoski, chair of the International Man Booker Prize in 2011, explains why the prize was given to Roth that year.