An interview with Philip Roth

What exactly are you looking for from an interview with a writer?

Insights into their work? Views on other writers? Opinions on issues of the day?

I admit that I fell eagerly onto Robert McCrum's interview with Philip Roth in today's Observer, and, in many ways, it was a job well done.

We learned about Roth's domestic arrangements (he lives alone in Connecticut for most of the year), his work habits (he writes every day) and his growing isolation (contemporaries like Miller, Styron and Mailer keep dying).

But, though The Observer billed it as "an extraordinary interview with America's greatest living novelist", the obvious truth is that if you want to know about a writer you should read their books. Basically, Roth reveals nothing of significance. Why should he?

Here are the blinding insights from the end of the interview.

Does he, I wonder, regret not having children? 'Well, I don't seem to go around regretting it, no. I was busy doing other things, you know, and then the opportunity slipped away because of age and the age of the women I was with.'

He still likes to exercise. Most days, while it's warm, he'll swim in his pool at the bottom of the garden.

So, now we know.

Hidden away half-way through the interview, however, is something surprising: McCrum's swift dismissal of much of Roth's work.

From his middle age, many novels of Roth's literary self-obsession do not weather well. They seem contrived, and rather lacking in humanity. At this point in the game, perhaps the best you can say is that he still harbours an ambition for simple greatness that has, thus far, seemed to slip through his fingers.

Roth, we later learn 'does not bother with reviews', so perhaps this is McCrum's assertion of his own significance - able to bring 'America's greatest living novelist' down to size (although not to his face).

The final paragraph has a slightly similar feel. McCrum gets his copy of Roth's latest book signed (!) and then:

As I turn the car in the short driveway I see an old grey man walking slowly through the trees back to his studio for the inevitable rendezvous with his desk, a writer happily alone with his many selves, all passion spent.

All passion spent? There's nothing about Roth's recent writing, or what he says to McCrum, that suggest that to me.

I was reminded of Anne Enright's hilarious essay about book readings, and the question and answer session that inevitably follows.

"Why are you so bitter?" says the woman in the front row, before they can fumble a mike across to her. She is sitting very straight. She seems to be wearing a hat with flowers and a pheasant in it, but of course she is not - that is just your imagination. "Why are you so bitter?" she says again, louder, just in case you are trying to slither out of it - your bitterness, she means, in case you are trying to wriggle off your own, horrible hook. And it takes you six months to answer her, in your head. "Chekhov wasn't cheerful. Beckett wasn't a barrel of laughs. Why do you want women to be nice, when they write?"
It is, in fact, years before you realise that the real answer is: "Straight back atcha, Missus." Long experience tells you that it is the angry people who ask about anger, the depressed about depression, the tender-hearted about love. This is the writer as mirror, and a dark mirror at that. "How do you get away with saying what I only feel?"

So what do McCrum's questions and observations say about him?