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In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years 'for the entire work of the recipient'.
Philip Roth is the ideal focus of this most intriguing of books. Recently the recipient of four major American literary honours, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, he here enters into debate with some of the world's leading authors and the result is an engrossing, deeply thought-provoking volume that goes to the very heart of what it is to be a writer. The central question at the core of the book essentially asks how literatures form in a writer's mind, specifically in the context of the way a creative person's imagination is stimulated by the outside world and their immediate environment. The largest section of the book is a dialogue between Roth and several of his fellow writers presented in a simple interview mode that works beautifully, allowing readers to feel as if they are sitting in the same room, raptly listening to masters of their art in conversation. In a series of conversations spanning decades, Roth talks to Italy's Primo Levi, to Czechoslovakia's Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima and Ireland's Edna O'Brien amongst others as politics, region and history come under scrutiny; the key focus being the way a writer's individual path is forged from the broader canvas of the outside world. With writers like Levi, Appelfeld and Klima, all of whom experienced the concentration camps, the subject of the Holocaust is a common thread. Often forced into exile, these men discuss the notion of homeland and dislocation; the whole nature of what constitutes identity gradually evolves as the book's leitmotif. It's an admirable study of the imaginative impulse filtered through the lens of time and place and is utterly captivating in its intensity. Roth's own prose occasionally tends towards the over-cerebral, but he also has the wisdom bestowed by a long and distinguished literary life. Two concise - if rather superfluous - portraits of artists whom Roth admires conclude an intellectually invigorating - and humane - book that will appeal to anyone who's ever wondered about the way writers relate to the world, both in terms of their own evolution and as reflections of the society that shapes them. (Kirkus UK)
