3 December 2025

Never recommend Philip Roth to your mother

Her face was a mask of horror

It’s funny how it’s often the little things that are the tipping point. On Monday and for most of Tuesday I found myself in an unusually good mood. This is directly attributable to my mother’s return from hospital and the end of my duties as cat-sitter. That was on the Friday, but it took a while to set in because I first had a 24-hour period during which I stayed in the house with her to make sure she was OK.

My brother had arranged a huge Ocado delivery to sustain her for the next month or so. We had consulted on the shopping list. When my mother arrived, and we pointed out what we’d got for her, she asked “Where are the vegetables?” She had a point. The Lezard male doesn’t really do vegetables, unless they are roast potatoes. Never mind. I made a massive pot of chilli for her homecoming – a dish she taught me to cook. That has kidney beans in it. Kidney beans are a kind of vegetable, right? Also tomatoes, which I know are fruit but as Bernard Levin once said, you put salt on tomatoes, so that means they’re vegetables. I never thought Levin was as clever as he was cracked up to be, but on this he made a persuasive point.

Before the dinner, which my brother and sister-in-law joined us for, thank goodness, I had had a trying day with my mother. I sat on the sofa in the living room with her, reading a book while she watched the telly at ear-shattering volume. The interesting thing about my mother’s deafness is that while it renders conversation at normal volumes impossible, she can pick up the kind of sound you need specialist audio equipment to detect. At one point I made a sound, like a cross between a grunt and a “hm”. This is one of the sounds the gentleman of a certain age makes when he lives on his own. They can all be filed under the general heading “old-fart noises” and although there is a range of them they sound roughly the same. They mean “I have just thought of something”, “I have just sat down”, “I have just got up”, “the milk is off” and yet also “the milk is not off”. One makes these noises for several other reasons too, but mainly because one does not live with anybody else who can say, “Stop making those noises.”

Over the din of the TV, my mother’s piercing voice asked: “WHAT WAS THAT NOISE YOU MADE?” As it happened, this was my “I have just read something interesting in this book” noise. But I could not say, “I have just read something interesting in this book,” because she would then ask what the book was and what was interesting in it. And the reason I could not answer her was because the book was about Philip Roth, and if I said that a whole cascade of unpleasant associations would begin.

It’s not only what Philip Roth had to say about mothers. That’s bad enough. (In a nutshell: “Get out while you can.”) But it’s also that shortly after it came out, I bought her Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre (1995), for her birthday. My reasoning: she reads good books (or did then); she spent her childhood in New Jersey, like Roth, and, well, Roth’s a good writer. What I had not done was read the book. It would have been wise to have done so. The next time I saw her, her face was a mask of horror. “That book you gave me,” was all she said. By this time, I knew what was in the book, and I could see her reasoning: this is not the kind of book to give your saintly silver-haired mother on her birthday, even if she is from New Jersey. I will spare you the details if you have not read it. If you have, you will know what I mean. It doesn’t exactly make Portnoy’s Complaint look like Ant and Bee, but it’s getting there. So I said, “Oh, nothing,” and retired to my boudoir upstairs. At least I was safe there: she’s not allowed to use the stairs yet.

The next morning, I said my goodbyes and skipped off to Brighton as fast as my legs, the Northern Line and Thameslink could carry me. Which liberation, and return to my little Hove-l, where I can make old-fart noises until I am blue in the face, put me in an exceedingly good mood right until Tuesday. It put me in such a good mood I even made my bed properly. This is something normal people do every day but this is the first time I had tackled it in a month. The typical state of my bed bespeaks a heterosexual male who is extremely well read but is fantastically depressed. Books, about 30, all down one side, the fitted sheet self-detached and in a knot somewhere unreachable at the bottom corner, crumbs everywhere. But now I had fitted the sheet, now clean, made the pillowcases behave themselves, and put the books in an orderly pile.

Of course, happiness does not last, as the poets and philosophers keep telling us. So what was the thing, the canker in the rose, that collapsed my sense of well-being? Believe it or not, it was the words of a Radio 4 continuity announcer on Tuesday evening. And these words were: “Just one more sleep until the Budget.”

Seriously? And do I have to explain why this is wrong? Sure, the BBC is facing worse challenges than this. But lay off the baby language, will you? I’m going back to my bed, which is still nice.

[Further reading: Around the world in 50 Irish pubs]