“The struggle with writing is over…”

It goes without saying that if an ambitious young novelist could chose to have any career in American letters, it would be Philip Roth’s. Roth is unique in the history of contemporary literature in having peaked at three separate points, each time at a higher plateau than before: he was famous by his late twenties, had his first huge bestseller in his mid-thirties, and produced his most lasting string of masterpieces in his sixties. No other author in recent memory has managed to remain so relevant for so long, and these days, it’s hard to imagine anyone doing it ever again, at least not at Roth’s level of productivity and prominence. It’s not surprising, then, that his withdrawal from writing would be equally unprecedented: it was disclosed so casually, in an interview in French, that it took the rest of the world more than a month to realize that an announcement had even been made. But it’s clear now that he meant it. And the prospect of an author like Roth simply walking away from the craft that he’d mastered like few other authors of his era is enough to raise questions in the mind of anyone who hopes to follow, even in the most tentative way, in his imposing footsteps.

Roth’s announcement is so striking because we simply aren’t used to the idea of a writer retiring. Eminent novelists, in general, fall into one of three predictable categories. They can continue to produce handsome new volumes on a regular basis, like Updike, even if they no longer occupy quite the same cultural position they did in their prime; they can lapse into inactivity despite a protracted struggle to write, like Capote or Ellison; or they can settle into an extended, mysterious silence, like Salinger, who evidently continued writing every day at his comfortable home in New Hampshire. Roth, by contrast, is still more than physically and intellectually capable of producing quality work, but has concluded that it’s no longer worth the effort. And he should know: year after year, Roth worked harder than any other writer of his generation, aside perhaps from Bellow, at the problem of being a major novelist, and was never sidetracked, like Mailer, by journalistic or dilettantish distractions. He wrote standing up, like a surgeon, a symphony conductor, or Walter Murch at his editing machine. And although it may seem strange that he’d choose to step away now, part of me wonders if it isn’t, in fact, a perfectly sane decision.

Writing a novel is hugely difficult, even, or especially, if you’re good at it. “I can’t face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away,” Roth said to Charles McGrath of the New York Times. “I can’t do that anymore.” He knows as well as anyone that even if you’ve written thirty novels and gotten rich and famous in the process, that’s no guarantee that you can do it again tomorrow. Writing fiction is the best job in the world for those with the necessary temperament, but it’s also solitary, frustrating, and the source of endless psychological disquiet. It’s stranger, perhaps, to persist in courting such daily punishment when you’ve already accomplished all you could ever have reasonably expected. Far healthier, and more human, to live out your remaining days in peace, without staring down a blank page, to catch up on your reading and work on your memoirs and learn how to use an iPhone. It’s liberating in a way that writing always promises, but can never quite deliver, and we can glimpse something of that liberation in the note posted to Roth’s computer: “The struggle with writing is over.”

Whether it lasts is another question entirely. As Roth has made clear in his Times interview, he has plenty of other projects in the meantime: he’s collaborating on a novella with a former girlfriend’s eight-year-old daughter, and is writing up voluminous notes for Blake Bailey, his biographer, even if Bailey admits that he won’t be able to get through them all for years. If writing a novel is hard labor, these are the literary equivalents of play, and I’d like to see Roth pursue them with joy and serenity—which may be his last great experiment. Every writer, I suspect, secretly hopes that one day he’ll write the one perfect, definitive novel that will finally allow him to rest. Most of us eventually conclude that it isn’t going to happen: we’re too used to striving, and too critical of all we’ve done in the past, to be content with what we’ve accomplished. But for the sake of those of us who still dream, irrationally, that some measure of peace and tranquillity will be there for us in the end, I really hope that Roth does it. Even if it only took him half a century to get there.