The American Narrator

The Globe and Mail put up this photo gallery of Philip Roth "through the years" last week with their article on his move to the city. I'm assuming he would hate that anyone is interested in pictures of himself, but like he said himself, the screens have changed this generation - I want to see a face.

What I always find interesting in Roth's work - one of the many things - is his complex narration. His novels are never told from one person, about his own life. Instead, when Roth isn't using Nathan Zuckerman, he's using some sort of filter - a man telling a story about a man, who tells a story about a nation. Roth talks of his use of narrators:

You have a kind of intelligence between the readers and the events which puts them in moral perspective. My ‘Marlows,’ as Conrad’s Marlows did, drop away during the course of the telling. Sometimes they come back and sometimes they don’t. But they set the scene, so you don’t have to go through all that explanation and exposition. They’re good, these characters. They’re fun to have.

That is precisely what happens when someone writes about Roth. It never matters what they write, I usually forget what they write. It's Roth's quotations, his incredible insight into the world and his laissez-faire attitude about meanings, that stands out.