Thanks to Slate, I found out about a unique news article by The Newark Star-Ledger’s Mark DiIonno regarding Philip Roth today. Apparently for the past several years, the Newark Preservation & Landmarks Committee has hosted a bus tour of Philip Roth’s Newark. This year there was a slight twist, as Roth himself joined in on the tour.
I’ll be honest, except from limited exposure in my college English lit days, I have not been partial to reading Roth’s work. But here’s how good an article that DiIonno wrote, I now find myself wanting to read Roth. Or as DiIonno put it: “The mark of a good columnist is to know when to get out of the way of a great writer, and so Philip Roth’s written words speak for themselves.”
Follow this link to see what I’m talking about. Looking over the Roth’s excerpts, I think my favorite quote was Roth’s description of a Newark park (from Roth’s 1959 book, Goodbye, Columbus): “The park … was empty and shady and smelled of trees, night and dog leavings; and there was a faint damp smell too, indicating that the huge rhino of a water cleaner had passed by already, soaking and whisking the downtown streets.”
I respect a newspaper writer who can effectively quote literature.