Philip Roth Hates Change

Reuters reporter Christine Kearney asks Philip Roth about e-readers, a device over which the author of the new novel Nemesis has likely lost little sleep. Of the larger question of technology in general, Roth says:

"The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence, all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people's reach anymore," he said.

Beginning with film in the 20th Century, then television, then computers, and more recently social media networks such as Facebook, the reader is now utterly distracted, he said.

"Now it is the multiple screens and there is no competing against it," Roth said. Roth does not plan to buy any kind of e-reading device such as Amazon's Kindle. "I don't see what the point is for me," he said. "I like to read in bed at night and I like to read with a book. I can't stand change anyway."

Kearney’s second topic struck me—if not Roth—as more interesting.

"Among the publishing chatter about a possible impending death of the popular, longer novel and the growth of novellas due to e-readers,” Kearney writes, "Nemesis—clocking in at about 56,000 words—is Roth's latest in a cycle of short novels."

While I’ve caught none of this chatter, Kearney suggests that Roth is on the cutting edge of the trend. “I am with the times,” Roth jokes.

Roth, author Goodbye, Columbus, says he asked Saul Bellow, author of The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog, how to write a short novel.

I talked to him and said "How do you do it?" And he didn't know any more than anybody else. So we just laughed.