Word: roth
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...pavilion for the one last year in Hanover, Germany. And, really, why should it have? Who needs to stand in line outside a geodesic dome to find out what America produces? Who needs a product-display center to discover Lucinda Williams? Or a monorail to take you to Philip Roth or Tom Ford? Anywhere in the world you find a movie screen or a museum, a bookstore or a TV, a clothing outlet or a computer terminal, you're at the entrance to the American pavilion...
...great art is born all the time out of what is loud, vivid and swaggering, or even conventional and sentimental--in short, out of the primordial ooze of low culture. Consider the modern novel. In the hands of a master like Philip Roth, it can register the smallest vibrations of the interior life or the broadest convulsions of the wider world. But when it emerged as an art form in the 18th century--springing from a flux of cheap pamphlets, folktales, adventurers' memoirs and religious allegories--it was widely despised as philistine trash, a plaything for an undiscriminating middle class...
Writers, like the rest of us, are entitled to slow down when they approach retirement age. What Philip Roth did, as he began anticipating the popularly euphemistic Golden Years, was to gun his engine and rev out in rapid succession three of the strongest, most vibrant novels of his long career...
Solely on the basis of his output over the past 10 or so years--which also includes the uproarious Operation Shylock (1993); the brooding, death-haunted Sabbath's Theater (1995); and the terse, erotic The Dying Animal, published in May--Roth, 68, would win much support as America's best working novelist. Who else during the same period published so much of such consistently high quality? Even more remarkably, Roth has maintained this elevated standard for more than 40 years, a creative marathon that totals 20 books of fiction. Not all of these are masterpieces, but all are unfailingly ambitious...
...when he is good, he is spectacular. Roth's 1959 debut, Goodbye, Columbus, a collection of five stories and the title novella, won a National Book Award. Having leaped from promising to prizewinning in a single bound, Roth could have set about repeating the formula that had brought him such instant recognition. But one of his more intriguing aspects has been his refusal to tailor his work to anyone else's expectations. Within a decade of the delicate Jamesian fiction in Goodbye, Columbus, Roth wrote Portnoy's Complaint, a barbaric yawp of masturbatory misadventures and comic rage...