During that first year at Newark Rutgers, during the many hours each day when I didn’t have classes, the stacks and the reference room and the reading room were where I camped out when I wanted a quiet place to be alone to read or to study or to look something up. It was my other Newark home. My first other home.”
Philip Roth on the Newark Public Library
Today, March 18, is Philip Roth’s birthday—he was born in 1933. In his honor, I step back in time to a cold, rainy night at the Newark Public Library, a gorgeous Beaux Arts palace of books. It was an evening tailor-made for book lovers: Beloved native son Philip Roth had agreed to donate his massive personal library to the Newark Public Library. In celebration, a lecture was given by award-winning novelist, Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, NW and On Beauty.
My son Alex is a huge Philip Roth fan. I snagged two spots for the event. In a talk called, “The I Who Is Not I,” Smith swept across the literary waterfront, from Shakespeare to Nabokov to Roth, with wit and ease. Of the wildly creative and protean Roth’s influence on writers and readers, Smith said the message was simple: “Portnoy exists — be as you please.” Above all, Roth’s writing conferred the “liberty to create free characters.”
Zadie also offered a glimpse into her own writing life. A few nuggets:
• On craft: “I don’t plan my novels much in general.”
• On truth: “Fiction for me is more of an escape from self than an exploration of self.”
• On lies: “Writers all claim that it’s all fiction, and readers all suspect that it isn’t.”
• On writing in first person: “You have your readers where you want them — in the palm of your hand…. First person opens up the possibility of telling a true lie.”
• On writing: “A creation of effects,” an “imitation of life,” offering “echoes and fragments — this writing can do.”
• On reading: “The original joy of my life.”
Bravo, Philip, well written! Bravo, Zadie — write on!
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