February 18 – April 16, 2023

I’m not even necessarily the biggest Roth guy. When I got asked to cover “Philip Roth Unbound,” a festival to celebrate and “agitate” his legacy, I hadn’t read but a handful of his books. But, looking over the press release, I was drawn to how intense the schedule was set up to be: three full days of panels, live readings, and comedy shows, all in his hometown of Newark. Roth compared novel-writing to the tedium of baseball, and there was something athletic about how these events were stacked up, one after another, jam-packed with renowned writers and themes encompassing the breadth of Roth’s vision. I’d view this like a marathon, one that I’d need to read the rest of his books to prepare for. I’d read maybe six. He wrote thirty-one. We were a month out. Plenty of time, I decided.

Having read Roth’s debut, as well as Portnoy’s Complaint and the Zuckerman novels through Counterlife, I figured I’d pick up where I left off. I was most drawn to the stretch of novels he wrote in the nineties, when, at fifty, after the death of his father and the failure of his marriage, he self-exiled and “became a monk of fiction,” as David Remnick put it in a 2018 profile. “Living alone in the woods,” he wrote, Roth stayed “trained on the sentence, the page, the ‘problem of the novel at hand.’” This decade produced the novels that would sweep a huge number of major literary awards—a National Book Critics Circle award, a PEN/Faulkner, a Pulitzer, his second National Book Award. Wanting to absorb the fruits of his exile, I exiled myself and, starting with Patrimony—about his father dying, published in 1991, the year I was born—got to reading methodically forward.

I felt awed, in places, by these books’ ambition; impatient, in others, with their unbridled maximalism. Their willingness to meander, to dwell in dialogue, read like luxuries novelists aren’t afforded today. There’s a consistent emphasis on race and class in these books, on the challenges of coexisting in America, that surprised me. Reckoning with one’s roots yet remaining free to defy and define oneself outside of them. This comes through most explicitly in The Human Stain, where his critiques of an unexamined sanctimoniousness undergirding American propriety, Lewinsky-era Puritanism, and lazy campus moralizing read as disconcertingly contemporary. “Canceled older professor with a propensity toward sexual deviance” emerges as an archetype.

Come festival day, I’ve read maybe six more Roth books, not counting audio. I’m currently deep into American Pastoral (1997), Roth’s portrait of the Swede, his most morally upright protagonist, whose morality nonetheless fails him. Walking to CVS to get a new notebook, morning of, the audiobook of The Plot Against America in my ears, I wish I had more time. That I could stay exiled, “trained on the page” forever. But the sun is out; the world is thawing, spring is coming. I dress up nice and hit it.

After Chelsea at last bowed out of the Champions League last night, Marcus, Andy and Luke are left scratching their heads over Frank Lampard’s lineup and… quite a lot of things really. 

Including: is the club in SUCH a bad way that an old Blockbuster cardboard cutout of Jean-Claude Van Damme would be pretty much as able a manager as a sentient Luis Enrique? Stay tuned.

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February 26 – May 6, 2023

March 19 – April 30, 2023

To read Saskia Hamilton’s “Faring,” the opening poem in her forthcoming collection, All Souls, is to move through time in acts of seeing and of noting what is seen. The morning ticks along as light enters to illuminate both the surrounding structure, window ledge, doves—and the sounds that seep in, wind, construction. To track the light, as the season moves into longer days, is to follow the shadows of others moving here and there behind curtains across the way. The cyclical nature of dawn’s return creates illusions of certainty for future days, though the speaker in “Faring” lives within an illness that names death its cure. This does not prevent love’s negotiation with time, as a child withholds declarations of love in fear of time’s retaliatory embrace. For now, the day seems to say, Let the ordinary amaze, it’s the grace we hold.

“Faring” builds its rooms against the too-muchness of life, life’s actual, red-hot intensities, for fear that even the caring inquiry “How are you faring?” will no longer be a relevant question, or that the tracking of the gray morning sunrise will be the only relevant answer.

Like the eighteenth-century abolitionist poet William Cowper, who is called forward in “Faring” by his poem—the book open, perhaps, on the speaker’s bedside table, like table talk—Hamilton rests her sights on what can be apprehended from a bed, sofa, chair, or window, and named in the quotidian. These small recognitions ensure a life’s weightiness, wariness, worthiness. Three centuries after Cowper, it’s not the countryside but the cityscape that allows Hamilton access to her own inner landscape. 

The brilliance of “Faring,” as well as its task, resides in its narrative charting of daily moments lived as “a soothing down.”

The inadvertent downside of novels and films about global warming

What’s that? The Grim Reaper in the front row of Goodison Park? That can only mean one thing…

This Saturday will mark 9 years since David Moyes was sacked – not just as Manchester United boss, but as Sir Alex Ferguson’s not-so-carefully anointed successor. Marcus, Jim, Andy and Vish look back on a truly sensational 9 months in charge!

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How two men are rescuing its great antiquities from around the world

March 10 – April 23, 2023