Everyone thought he would go on forever. And didn’t many of us assume that the public retirement was merely private retrenchment—that Philip Roth was still writing every day at home, because he could never not write? More than any other postwar American novelist, Roth wrote the self—the self was examined, cajoled, lampooned, fictionalized, ghosted, exalted, disgraced, but above all constituted by and in writing. Maybe you have to go back to the very different Henry James to find an American novelist so purely a bundle of words, so restlessly and absolutely committed to the investigation and construction of life through language. (In the English tradition, that writer would be D. H. Lawrence, who seems Roth’s truer precursor in every way.) You could find him at times repetitive, only intermittently good; you could certainly find his increasingly conservative politics resistible, and hope that, one day, he might represent relations between men and women as something other than purely erotic. But I admired him above all other living American novelists because his life and work had the only quality that really matters: that of unceasing necessity. He would not cease from exploration; he could not cease; and the varieties of fiction existed in order for him to explore the varieties of experience. Roth wrote some essays, and some of them are really fine. His memoir of his father, “Patrimony,” is a beautiful book. But he was essentially a monomaniac, a fanatic of fiction. The novel was the only instrument that mattered. He lived with it and through it, like any demented virtuoso. Purity of heart is to will one thing, says Kierkegaard. Roth, that vitally dirty-minded man, was very pure.
Roth’s explorations were ultimately metaphysical: What is a self? Don’t we invent ourselves, and isn’t this invention the very definition of life? What is desire? What is Jewishness? How should we live, and how should we die? Roth’s men (yes, all men) live their lives suspended between “the fantasy of endlessness” and “the fact of finitude,” as he put it in “Sabbath’s Theater” (the book that, increasingly, seems to lie at the very center of his work). Desire expands life, and holds off death. And comedy does the same, which is why we are so moved when Nathan Zuckerman, in “The Ghost Writer,” imagines telling his parents that he has made good by marrying Anne Frank, who has somehow survived the Holocaust—it’s a great, rude, risky joke. (“Fuck the laudable ideologies,” sings Mickey Sabbath.) Like all great comedy, it brings the dead back into an eternal comic present.
Any family that names its seaside cottage “the Sea Section” and seriously considers “The Amniotic Shack” as an alternative is not exactly normal. But “Calypso” reveals the later-day Mr. Sedaris to be more ruminative, more serious, and a little less inclined to play everything for laughs. He is 61 now, and life has crept up on him.
His quick, charismatic and acerbically clever late mother is revealed in the essay “Why Aren’t You Laughing?” to have been an angry alcoholic who abused and embarrassed her family even as they refused to acknowledge what was going on. The essay “Now We Are Five” poignantly discusses, in Mr. Sedaris’s familiarly discursive way, the suicide of his troubled sister, Tiffany.
But the vicissitudes of his daily life are not so different from the vicissitudes of your life and mine, even if his eye for detail and way of processing the world around him are wholly his own. And one of his gifts as a writer is his ability to slip so easily between the profound and the mundane.
With big dreams come rude awakenings, and the dreams that built a thriving metropolis in a remote corner of Southern California were bigger than most. Los Angeles was once a sparsely settled hinterland, isolated by desert and mountains, constrained by the trickling water supply of the Los Angeles River. As Gary Krist gently puts it in his new book, “It was no sensible place to build a great city.”
Anyone even casually acquainted with Los Angeles has probably heard a version of that sentiment before. But then “The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles” doesn’t pretend to overhaul our understanding with cutting-edge theories or historical bombshells. Krist, who wrote novels before turning to popular histories of Chicago (“City of Scoundrels”) and New Orleans (“Empire of Sin”), marshals his considerable storytelling skills to capture Los Angeles at a critical moment: the period between 1900 and 1930, when an agricultural town of 100,000 people became a burgeoning city of 1.2 million, replete with new industries, a new identity and, crucially, newfound water.