On the shelf
Reading Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) is akin to eavesdropping. In a collection of previously published interviews and essays, Philip Roth, AM'55, talks with Primo Levi about work in a paint factory ("At the peak of my career, I numbered among the thirty or forty specialists in the world…."); with Milan Kundera about the importance of a sense of humor ("I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn't fear, by the way he smiled."); and with Edna O'Brien about the role her childhood plays in her work ("It's the price of being a writer. One is dogged by the past-pain, sensations, rejections, all of it.").

In addition to these conversations and exchanges with writers Aharon Appelfeld, Ivan Klíma, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Mary McCarthy, Roth includes essays about painter Philip Guston and fellow American novelists Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow, X'39. In "Rereading Saul Bellow," he ends by asking the same question about Bellow that Henderson asks about another character in Henderson the Rain King (1959): "What's he in Chicago for?"

"Not until the third book, Augie March," writes Roth, "did Bellow fully apprehend Chicago as that valuable hunk of literary property, that tangible, engrossing American place that was his to claim as commandingly as Sicily was monopolized by Verga, London by Dickens, and the Mississippi River by Mark Twain." Thirty years later, in The Dean's December, Roth argues, that sense of connection is gone: "The book's very point is that this huge place is Bellow's no longer." - M.R.Y.

---