Q & A: Philip Roth

       At her The Book Haven weblog Cynthia Haven has a nice e-mail interview with Philip Roth -- with a focus on The Ghost Writer (twenty-five years on).
       Nice to find observations such as:

From my many years as a university literature teacher I do know that it takes all the rigor one can muster over the course of a semester to get even the best undergraduates to read precisely the fiction at hand, with all their intelligence, without habitual moralizing, ingenious interpretation, biographical speculation and, too, to beware of the awful specter of the steamrolling generalization.

       Roth also reïterates:

I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction

       I appreciate the: "I did what I did and it's done"-sentiment (and I wish more writers saw that light, too, rather than forcing the issue ...), but as to the laughable idea that there could be more to life than fiction ..... How sad to think of Roth reduced to: "studying 19th-century American history" (and sadder yet: following ... baseball) when he could at least be reading fiction, if not writing it.