Philip Roth: A eulogy for a living man

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 17:05:00 +0000

No one should have been surprised when Philip Roth casually announced in the French magazine Les Inrocks that he was retiring. At 79, Roth is the celebrated author of 31 books (all of them impressive, many of them masterpieces), the winner of just about every major literary award but the Nobel, and though he has remained remarkably prolific, his four most recent novels have been brief, spare, and uncharacteristically quiet; reading them, one has the sense of looking through a camera as the aperture slowly contracts.

“I have dedicated my life to the novel,” Roth explained. “I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough!”

Yes Roth is hanging up his gloves, and this deviation to a boxing metaphor is by no means accidental: in Roth’s books, everything is a fight. It was the combative, oppositional nature of his storytelling that mesmerized me when I first read him. His characters go after each other with a staggering vitality, clashing conversationally, emotionally, politically, philosophically, and erotically (sometimes all in the same scene), and in their spirited exchanges of outrage and defiance, accusation and desire, Roth moves the reader beyond the simple bloodlust of watching a fight ringside to the dark and disquieting self-revelations that scare us.

How Marvel created the modern blockbuster

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Thanks to the box office domination of superhero movies like "The Avengers," "Iron-Man," "Spider-Man" and "The X-Men," Marvel Entertainment has become as widely recognizable as Disney, its parent company. What you may be less familiar with, however, are Marvel’s comics.

Decades before the movies and TV shows and fast-food tie-ins, before the lunchboxes and the Halloween costumes, a tiny, understaffed and restlessly creative magazine publisher began churning out pages and pages of comic book art. Whereas comics had once been characterized by junky kids’ titles, repetitive genre pieces and stiff, wearyingly noble superhero archetypes, Marvel characters were a revelation. Marked by humor, pathos and bold artwork, they were refreshingly complicated creations.

Perhaps the most complicated creation of all, however, was Marvel itself. As Sean Howe details in his exhaustively researched and extraordinarily compelling "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story," the company behind the creative onslaught was as contradictory and capricious as any of its characters. In the “Merry Marvel Bullpen,” friendships were wrecked, careers were destroyed and hearts were routinely broken. Peter Parker’s stint at the arachnophobic Daily Bugle was, in comparison, like working at Google.

Salon.com > Panio Gianopoulos

Philip Roth: A eulogy for a living man

How Marvel created the modern blockbuster