Ecce Homo Erectus. Saul Bellow, John Updike … at 77, Philip Roth is the last of three giants still standing; and he actually does stand to write, at a lectern-like desk — scriptern? This verticality is crucial to his ideas of self and spirit, and is fully evident in his fiction, which is nothing if not erect.
Ecce Homo Erectus. Saul Bellow, John Updike … at 77, Philip Roth is the last of three giants still standing; and he actually does stand to write, at a lectern-like desk — scriptern? This verticality is crucial to his ideas of self and spirit, and is fully evident in his fiction, which is nothing if not erect.
By any standard, let alone his own, his 31st novel is exceptionally chaste, and its erections are not the sort one expects from the author of Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theatre. His subject in Nemesis is still more literal and elemental: the act, skill, habit and capability of standing, and such threats to it as war and disease.
The story is brief, and extremely sad.
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