What Did He Want? To Possess His Readers, Just For A Time

Philip Roth had just turned 50 that year in 1983 when he was asked how his novels might affect the ordinary reader. The question came near the end of a summer interview with literary biographer Hermione Lee, then a lecturer in English at the University of York. Their discussions over a day and a half in England would become “Philip Roth, The Art of Fiction No 84” in The Paris Review, Fall 1984.

“Novels provide readers with something to read,” Roth answered. “At their best writers change the way readers read. That seems to me the only realistic expectation. It also seems to me quite enough.”

Lee, who would go on to be president of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, pressed  Roth further on his literary power. He was in the final stages of writing The Anatomy Lesson:

“You asked me if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure there’s been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it’s a way of life for them. It doesn’t mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book—if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don’t. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that’s otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn’t fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it’s not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading.” -Philip Roth

References:

Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others (New York, Vintage, 1985)