When Philip Roth told the French Magazine Les Inrocks that Nemesis would be his final novel, I privately hoped that the announcement was yet another literary game played at his reader's expense. Having studied and written about Roth for much of my adult life, I was used to being outsmarted by the writer. Could retirement be Roth's greatest imaginative feat yet? In allegedly living his life "sans language, shape, structure, meaning," as Nathan Zuckerman (Roth's longtime alter ego) would put it, I wondered whether the novelist had finally succeeded in unbinding himself from his own fictions.
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