From The Guardian:
From Portnoy’s Complaint to American Pastoral, Philip Roth’s jostling alter egos have provided the literary world with some of the great masterpieces of the past half-century. Here, as he celebrates his 75th birthday, the novelist talks to Robert McCrum about losing friends, living alone and why the next book will be his last.
It was the last weekend of summer – the Democratic convention looming; a late heatwave baffling the chills of fall – when I drove upstate from New York City to meet Philip Roth at home in northwest Connecticut. It’s like Switzerland round here – sparkling streams; plush, manicured properties; perfect meadows – with countless American flags advertising an air of patriotic entitlement. Roth’s remote grey clapboard house, dating to the revolution, is high on a hill down a quiet country road, not hard to find, but some miles from the nearest village, which is really a nothing place with two antique stores.
The tall figure who emerges from among the apple trees in greeting wears grey tracksuit bottoms and a long-sleeved grey sweatshirt that makes me think of prison garb in some progressive correctional regime. Before I find the composure to take in the burning intensity of his expression, the smooth grey features and interrogative tilt of the head, reminiscent of an American eagle, my first impression is that Philip Roth looks as much like a Supreme Court judge on furlough as one of his country’s most admired writers. In his own words, from the opening of The Ghost Writer, you could ‘begin to understand why hiding out twelve hundred feet up in the mountains with just the birds and the trees might not be a bad idea for a writer, Jewish or not… Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the gruelling, exalted, transcendent calling.’ Like his hero Zuckerman, Roth seems to have thought, ‘This is how I will live.’
More here.