Powerful voice falls silent

In the self-imposed retirement of his final years, Philip Roth remained curious and removed from the world he had shocked and had shocked him in return.

He praised younger authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Teju Cole, and confided that he had read Born to Run, the memoir by another New Jersey giant, Bruce Springsteen. He followed with horror the rise of Donald Trump and found himself reliving the imagined horrors of his novel The Plot Against America, in which the country succumbs to the fascist reign of President Charles Lindbergh.

But Roth, who died Tuesday at age 85, was also a voice – a defining one – of a generation nearing its end. He was among the last major writers raised without television, who ignored social media and believed in engaging readers through his work alone and not the alleged charms or virtues of his private self. He was safely outside Holden Caulfield’s fantasy that a favourite author could be “a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” He didn’t celebrate romantic love or military heroism or even consider the chance for heavenly justice.

The meaning of life, he once said, paraphrasing his idol Franz Kafka, is that it stops.

“Life’s most disturbing intensity is death,” he wrote in his novel Everyman, published in 2006.

Best known for works ranging from the wild and ribald Portnoy’s Complaint to the elegiac American Pastoral, Roth was among the greatest writers never to win the Nobel Prize. And he died, with dark and comic timing, in the year that the prize committee called off the award as it contended with a #MeToo scandal. He also died just minutes after the book world had concluded the annual Pen America gala in Manhattan and on the eve of another literary tradition – Wednesday’s annual induction ceremony at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which voted Roth in more than 40 years ago.