From The Guardian:
Philip Roth's recent novels have often gestured playfully towards the idea of a serene late style. Simon Axler in The Humbling (2009) broods on Prospero's “Our revels now are ended” speech from The Tempest; Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's most famous mask, sets a scene in Exit Ghost (2007) to Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs – music chosen “for the profundity that is achieved not by complexity but by clarity and simplicity . . . The composer drops all masks and, at the age of 82, stands before you naked. And you dissolve.” Do these references mean that Roth, who is now 77, is abjuring furious artifice for a sage-like calm? Of course not. Late Roth has more in common with the late Ibsen described in an essay by Edward Said: “An angry and disturbed artist who uses drama as an occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before.” Said called this kind of style, which he found deeply interesting, a “deliberately unproductive productiveness, a going against”.
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