Becca Jane Approximately
When your mother sends back your invitations
And your father to your sister he explains
That you're tired of yourself and all your creations
Won't you come and see me, Queen Jane?
John Updike Week: Day 5, Philip Roth
Philip Roth is one of those writers whose reputation is giant, and thus whose work seems like it would be impenetrable and old-fashioned (like John Updike!) but who is a magnificant, terrifyingly good writer, capturer of the I-95 Male Specimen in Repose. From American Pastoral:
“He’d invoked in me, when I was a boy—as he did in hundreds of other boys—the strongest fantasy I had of being someone else. But to wish oneself into another’s glory, as boy or as man, is an impossibility, untenable on psychological grounds if you are not a writer, and on aesthetic grounds if you are. To embrace your hero in his destruction, however—to let your hero’s life occur within you when everything is trying to diminish him, to imagine yourself into his bad luck, to implicate yourself not in his mindless ascendancy, when he is the fixed point of your adulation, but in the bewilderment of his tragic fall—well, that’s worth thinking about.”
