A Pulitzer Prize winning author of fiction… who doesn’t read fiction.
The conversation I’d longed to have with him since I first read him many decades ago, a conversation about fiction itself, died an early death.
“I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.”
How so?
“I don’t know. I wised up …”
And with those three words he gave me a long look from those fierce eyes and then a significant glance at my notebook, as if to say: That’s what I want you to write down.
The author is Philip Roth, whom I’ve never read. Years ago I read a few of the classic novelists: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton. But today I cannot finish a novel to save my life, and I do not know why.
Be the first to like this post.
No comments:
Post a Comment