Movie Review: 'Shattered Glass'

DATE October 31, 2003 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Philip Roth, author, talks about his book, “The Human Stain.”
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, in for Terry Gross.

Novelist Philip Roth first became known in the late '50s and '60s for writing
a new kind of story of Jewish identity. In books like "Portnoy's Complaint"
and "Goodbye Columbus," he wrote comically about young Jewish men who were
alienated from their culture and family. His most recent novel, "The Human
Stain," completed a trilogy that not only explores personal identity but looks
at how larger political and cultural events affect the lives of individuals.
The first book in the trilogy, "American Pastoral," won a Pulitzer Prize.
It's about the father of a radical activist opposed to the war in Vietnam.
The second novel, "I Married A Communist" is set in the McCarthy era.

"The Human Stain," is about life in the age of political correctness and has
just been made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins. The main character,
Coleman Silk, is a classics professor at a small liberal arts college who was
forced out after using a word that is misinterpreted as a racial slur. In
this scene the professor, played by Hopkins, tries to defend the use of the
word at a tense faculty meeting.

(Soundbite of "The Human Stain")

Ms. MIMI KUZYK: (As Professor Roux) Were you aware Professor Silk that Tracy
Cummings and Wyndem Thomas were African-Americans?

Mr. PHILIP ROTH (Author): (As Professor Coleman Silk) How could I be, I've
never seen them.

Ms. KUZYK: (As Professor Roux) But you are aware of the connotation of the
word `spook?'

Mr. ROTH: (As Professor Coleman Silk) Ghost, Professor Roux, ghost. I was
referring to their active plasmic character. Here's the first definition of
the word, I quote, "Spook, informal; ghost, specter."

Unidentified Man: Even so. Let me remind you of the second definition,
derogatory, negro.

Mr. ROTH: (As Professor Coleman Silk) I never laid eyes on them, how could I
know they were black? All I did know was that they were invisible.

Ms. KUZYK: (As Professor Roux) Nevertheless, they have lodged a complaint.
Ms. Cummings was devastated. Now the issue here...

Mr. ROTH: (As Professor Coleman Silk) These students have never attended a
single class. Do they exist or are they spooks? Consider the context.

Ms. KUZYK: (As Professor Roux) But don't...

Mr. ROTH: (As Professor Coleman Silk) I'm not finished.

The only issue is the nonattendance of these students, their inexcusable
neglected work and their sheer chutzpa. Oh, Ms. Cummings is devastated, give
me a break, will you? To charge me with racism is not only false, it is
spectacularly false and you know it.

BIANCULLI: A clip from the movie, "The Human Stain."

A little later in the story, we learn his secret, which reveals the paradox of
his situation. Although everyone believes he is Jewish, he is really a
light-skinned African-American who pretended to be Jewish after deciding to
pass as a white man. Terry spoke with Roth in 2000 and asked him to read a
scene from his book. In the scene Silk remembers the emotional impact of
telling his mother that he was going to pass and disassociate himself from his
black family.

Mr. PHILIP ROTH (Author): `He was murdering her. "You don't have to murder
your father. The world will do that for you. There are plenty of forces out
to get your father." The world will take care of him, as it had, indeed,
taken care of Mr. Silk. Who there is to murder is the mother, and that's
what he saw he was doing to her, the boy who'd been loved as he'd been loved
by this woman, murdering her on behalf of his exhilarating notion of freedom.
It would have been much easier without her, but only through this test can he
be the man he has chosen to be, unalterably separated from what he was handed
at birth, free to struggle at being free like any human being would wish to be
free. To get that from life, the alternate destiny on one's own terms, he
must do what must be done. Don't most people want to walk out of the lives
they've been handed? But they don't. And that's what makes them them and
this was what was making him him. Throw the punch, do the damage and forever
lock the door.'

`You can't do this to a wonderful mother who loves you unconditionally and has
made you happy. You can't inflict this pain and then think you can go back on
it. It's so awful that all you can do is live with it. Once you've done a
thing like this, you have done so much violence, it can never be undone, which
is what Coleman wants.'

TERRY GROSS (Host): (From 2000 interview) That's Philip Roth reading from his
new novel, "The Human Stain." Most of your main characters have been Jewish,
and some of them have felt kind of choked by Jewish culture. The idea of
writing a character who's African-American trying to pass as Jewish--how did
that come to you for the novel?

Mr. ROTH: It's a long process, which is hard for me to recapitulate and it's
hard to remember--especially months after you've finished a book, it's hard to
remember all the strands that went into the inspiration. However it came to
me, I was certainly made nervous by the notion. I wasn't delighted to have
had this idea in the beginning.

GROSS: What was the problem?

Mr. ROTH: What do you think the problem was? I was going to write a book
about a black man; not only a black man, but I was going to write about a
black man who becomes a white man. It was a kind of daunting notion. But one
sits down and one applies oneself to it. But it turned out I wasn't as
ignorant as I thought I was, and after a while, I hit it--in fact, the very
scene I just read, the scene in which Coleman repudiates his mother, this
marvelous mother he's had--I think it was in writing that scene that I came to
grips with the man, and I'd say the reason I came to grips with him or how I
came to grips with him was because I ceased defending him. I let the
brutality of the act come through.

GROSS: Now the character of Coleman Silk, the African-American professor
who's passing as white, is also a victim of political correctness. He calls
two students who have never come to class spooks. He says, `Does anyone know
these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?' And the two students who
have never come to class, it turns out, are African-American, which the
professor didn't know, and they, in turn, accuse him of racism, of having
referred to them with the racial slur of spooks. And as a result of this, he
ends up losing his job. Now one of the previous books in your trilogy, "I
Married A Communist," is about how lives are affected by McCarthyism. I'm
wondering if you see political correctness today as a kind of new McCarthyism,
as the new ideology of the day, similar to McCarthyism and how actions and
motives can often be misinterpreted, how group thinking can blow things out of
proportion, how a life can be ruined as a result?

Mr. ROTH: I think what joins those two political moments--the McCarthy
moment and the present moment--is what Hawthorne called in the "Scarlet
Letter" the persecuting spirit. My book is set in 1998, a great year for the
persecuting spirit if ever there was one. That was the year in which the
presidential impeachment took place and everything surrounding it. What
interested me about the inquisition on the college campus that does in Coleman
Silk was it seemed to me, the more I thought about it, an extension of the
general mood of the inquisition that had sort of begun to run wild in the
public life of the country. To be sure, that also was what was going on
during the McCarthy era, which I lived through as a college kid.

GROSS: In "I Married A Communist," I think it's Nathan Zuckerman who remarks
on the ideologies that fill people's heads and undermine their observation of
life--actually, it might be his teacher who says that--and I'm wondering if
you were ever caught up in an ideology, say, as a young man, if it ever seemed
like intellectual and romantic to you before you saw beyond the ideology?

Mr. ROTH: I don't think I'm an ideological type. I think it's hard for a
serious novelist who knows what novel writing is about to be an ideologue,
because writing fiction is founded in observation, and you can't observe
through the opaque presence of an ideology. The ideology observes for you.
So I think that writers, on the whole, tend to be anti-ideological and that,
to my mind, novels are assaults on generalizations, not endorsements of
generalizations.

GROSS: I think the answer to this is going to be `yes.' Have you made...

Mr. ROTH: Yeah. I'll say it right now, yes.

GROSS: Have you made observations as a novelist that you feel you were
punished or harshly criticized for writing or speaking?

Mr. ROTH: No, not at all. You have to be specific, I think.

GROSS: Well, I was thinking...

Mr. ROTH: You have something in mind.

GROSS: Well, I was thinking of your early literature with Portnoy when people
referred to you as a self-hating Jew and stuff.

Mr. ROTH: Oh, right, right. Oh, yes. Well, sure, I thought that those were
vicious, malicious and stupid epithets to attach to me, just contrary to all
the evidence. So, yeah, I felt assaulted by those kind of stupid
generalizations. But there's nothing you can do about just stupid
generalizations really. You can feel wounded by them, and you do, and you can
fight them, and you do, but in the end, the world grinds these things out the
way they make corn flakes at the Kellogg's plant, you know.

BIANCULLI: Philip Roth, speaking to Terry Gross in 2000. More after a break.
This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Our guest is Philip Roth. His newest novel, "The Human Stain,"
has just been made into a film starring Anthony Hopkins as the book's main
character Coleman Silk.

GROSS: In some of your books, your surrogate, your alter ego, is the
character of Nathan Zuckerman, and in your latest book, "The Human Stain," the
professor seeks out Zuckerman so he can tell Zuckerman his story in the hopes
that Zuckerman will tell it and set the record straight. Zuckerman is also
the scribe for the other two books in your trilogy. Why use him as the
narrator? Why not, say, let the main character tell the story? Why not let
the professor in "The Human Stain" just tell his story? Or why not have,
like, the omniscient third person, unnamed narrator tell the story? What
narrative problems do you solve by having Zuckerman the narrator?

Mr. ROTH: Well, the biggest problem I solve is nothing stands between me and
my spontaneous reaction to the material. That is, it's not just a cunning,
strategic process, you know. What you're trying to do when you write is find
your freedom as a writer. It's what every writer's trying to find. Maximally
deploy your powers. And I just feel this is a way I can maximally deploy my
powers. By this point in my career, I should be able to spontaneously land on
that voice, which will give me the most verbal freedom, imaginative freedom,
and that's what Zuckerman does for me. There's something about his
intelligence that awakens mine.

GROSS: Zuckerman is now, I think, 67 in the latest novel. Is that right?
65?

Mr. ROTH: In this book, I think he's something like 64 or 65.

GROSS: Yeah. And he's now living as a recluse, living alone in the country
and writing. He's had prostate cancer, and the surgery resulted in nerve
damage that left him incontinent and unable to have sex. There's a short
passage spoken by Zuckerman that I'd like you to read.

Mr. ROTH: Mm-hmm, sure.

GROSS: It's on page 36.

Mr. ROTH: OK. `I want to make clear that it wasn't impotence that led me
into a reclusive existence. To the contrary, I'd already been living and
writing for some 18 months in my two-room cabin up here in the Berkshires
when, following a routine physical exam, I received a preliminary diagnosis of
prostate cancer, and a month later, after the follow-up tests, went to Boston
for the prostatectomy. My point is that, by moving here, I had altered
deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul. And not because the
exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened
by time, but because I couldn't meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could
no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the
irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience or the toughness or the
shrewdness or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic
professionalism, to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory
meanings.

As a result, I was able to lessen a little my post-operative shock at the
prospect of permanent impotence by remembering that all the surgery had done
was to make me hold to a renunciation to which I had already voluntarily
submitted.'

GROSS: Philip Roth, I find it so interesting, you know, at the beginning of
your career with "Portnoy's Complaint," you became an author who became famous
for writing a character who was so involved with sexual imagination and sex
and very creative approaches to masturbation, and now you followed a different
character, the character of Zuckerman, to a point in his life where he is
physiologically unable to have sex and emotionally--perhaps not that sorry
about it. He's tired of what you describe as that erotic professionalism.
And I'm wondering why you--I realize there might not be an answer to this, but
why you wanted to put him in that predicament, why you wanted to explore that
kind of physiologically enforced celibacy?

Mr. ROTH: Right. When I was beginning this book--or not this book. I
should actually say go back to "American Pastoral," because the history of
Zuckerman's sexual retirement, as it were, begins in "American Pastoral." At
about the time I was writing that book, however many years ago it was, five or
six, there seemed to be to me a kind of epidemic of prostate cancer in the
circle of men who I was close to, and so I knew what men went through when
they went through this. And I suppose it's not too remote from what women go
through, the various gynecological surgeries or with a mastectomy. It's a
tremendous blow. It's a very, very difficult operation physically, forget the
consequences of it.

And I saw this being enacted in numerous places, and I thought, `Well, this
is--I've reached an age where this is now a kind of phenomenon of my
generation,' and so I decided to take it seriously. You know, it isn't the
plague, but it did seem to me a powerful blight on the sexuality and virility,
needless to say, of these men I know. So that's what interested me in it to
begin with. Shall we go on, Terry?

GROSS: Sure. Well, you know, I'm wondering, too, if, in following through on
that, it made you think in a different way about a certain type of virility, a
certain type of almost hyperactive male sexuality?

Mr. ROTH: Well, now we're going to get into who's going to measure what.
What's hyper...

GROSS: I'm the host of the show, I'll do the measuring.

Mr. ROTH: What's hyperactive down in Philadelphia, you know, may not be
hyperactive in Manhattan.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. ROTH: Well, you know, I think that a blow of that kind to a virile
heterosexual man is brutal. It has nothing to do with hypersexual activity,
if I may say so, but to one's sexual identity and to one's sense of physical
strength and completeness. It's a serious business. As for hyperactivity--to
take seriously what I said jokingly a moment ago, what is hyperactivity?
There are no sexual norms that an adult can take seriously. Just think about
the history of norms and how cruel they now seem. Think of the norm of
heterosexuality as opposed to homosexuality. That was a norm, was it not?
And it's no longer a norm.

So we don't know what the norms are. It's a very mysterious and enigmatic
business, sexual activity. And that's why I've been interested in the sexual
lives of men. I'm not out to titillate anybody. I'm not out to try to figure
out what it is and to represent it as best I can.

GROSS: There's also a wonderful paragraph that I think I will read about the
vulnerability that you expose yourself to in sexual intimacy, and this is said
by the African-American professor who's passing as white. And for him, the
sexual act kind of exposes him to the possibility of discovery. He says, `You
take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed
where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be,
however encrypted, is going to be found out. And that's what the shyness is
all about and what everybody fears. In that anarchic, crazy place, how much
of me is being seen, how much of me is being discovered?' I really like that a
lot.

Mr. ROTH: Good. Good. Well, I'm delighted that you do, and I'm delighted
that you read it. This book is about the things we've already talked about,
to be sure: the inquisitorial spirit, the persecuting spirit, what's called
political correctness, the "passing"--quote, unquote--of this man from one
culture to another. But I also wanted to investigate, represent the
transforming power of sex, the transforming power of the erotic. And there's
another passage--I don't think I could find it if I was searching for it now,
but when Zuckerman is recounting this sexual reawakening in this 71-year-old
man, and he says, `Who could be against it?'

BIANCULLI: Philip Roth, speaking with Terry Gross. We'll hear more of the
conversation in the second half of the show.

I'm David Bianculli and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli.

Let's get back to Terry's interview with Philip Roth. His newest novel, "The
Human Stain," has just been made into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and
directed by Robert Benton. The book completes his trilogy about the impact of
political and social events on the lives of individuals. "American Pastoral"
is about the father of a radical activist who opposes the war in Vietnam. "I
Married A Communist" is set in the McCarthy era. And "The Human Stain" is
about life in the age of political correctness. All three novels are narrated
by Roth's fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman.

GROSS: Two of the novels in your trilogy are about Zuckerman's boyhood
heroes, and in "I Married A Communist," the story revolves around two
brothers. One of those brothers was Zuckerman's English teacher when he was
in high school. The other is a working man who became a well-known radio
drama star and a Communist. And about Mr. Ringold, the English teacher,
Nathan Zuckerman says, `Mr. Ringold taught us thinking is the greatest
transgression of all. Critical thinking--there is the ultimate subversion.
Seeing it demonstrated by him provided the most valuable clue to growing up
that I had clutched at as a provincial, protected, high-minded high school kid
yearning to be rational and of consequence and free.'

Did you have such a teacher who--who really taught you the value of critical
thinking?

Mr. ROTH: I was lucky. I think I had more than one, though one is often
enough. And I think that most sort of bright American kids are fortunate
enough, usually, along the way to run into that man or woman who teaches you
to think. It's kind of an amazing thing, isn't it? I fell under the
influence of some people, largely in college--more in college than in high
school. I don't really think I knew how to think in high school. Once again,
Zuckerman's smarter than I was.

GROSS: Zuckerman also says he really liked men who could talk about baseball
and boxing and also talk about books, as if they really mattered. Did you,
too, when you were young, wanting to find that combination?

Mr. ROTH: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think for American boys growing up, as
I did, in the '30s and '40s, it was very hard to make the association between
one's--and I use this word in its widest sense--one's virility, one's
appetite, one's aggression and learning. And it was certainly very important
to make that association because without it, learning seems sort of
schoolmarmish, you know? And, by the way, I grew up in the era when 95
percent of the teachers were women. We were little boys raised in school, as
it were, by women. Some of them were quite wonderful teachers. Some of them
were just ordinary teachers, of course.

But to have a male teacher who brought a certain flavor into the classroom,
who was also intellectually demanding, so when he brought the flavor of his
masculinity and the sternness of his rigorous ...(unintelligible) into the
classroom, that was, indeed, a great blessing. And I do remember a couple
such men from my high school years, excluding, say, gym teachers. That was
something else.

GROSS: Who were the people in your life that first exposed you to a life that
was different from the life of your parents?

Mr. ROTH: I suppose a couple teachers did. I think that, as boys, we
brought each other up. I mean, the circle of friends one had as a kid. I
think what happens is the country brings you up, in a strange way, or to put
it another way the culture brings you up. And the richer the culture, the
more strange there are in the culture that aren't totally vulgar and stupid,
the better educated you get in becoming something new and becoming a new
generation. So one's parents give one plenty, but when you leave them--yes,
you're perfectly right--you need mentors. And I would, again, say I think
there's something in the larger society that educates you, and then there is
the circle of one's friends. And you educate each other, and you evolve into
a new social or cultural type through this sort of effort and--team effort
almost.

GROSS: Newark, New Jersey, plays a big part in your trilogy. You grew up in
Newark. What was your immediate neighborhood, your immediately culture like
when you were growing up and...

Mr. ROTH: Hmm. Well, I was born in '33, and so I guess by about '43 my eyes
were open and the war was on, World War II, and that was an overwhelming
experience, though, needless to say, the war was not fought here. But the
whole country was at war, and the mood of the country was determined totally
by the war. And I felt that mood in our neighborhood, as everywhere else. My
neighborhood was really a kind of Jewish village, I would say, in a city that
was made up of ethnic villages. The word ethnic did not exist. We never
thought of ourselves that way. I think ethic is a word that comes out of the
'60s, really. I mean, it existed, but it was not a word that we used to
describe ourselves.

And so I never thought of myself, by the way, as an American Jew. I think of
myself as an American or a Jewish American. These terms are utterly foreign
to me. I never felt anything but amused by the designation. But you can call
me a Newark Jew if you want to. There were Newark Italians. There were
Newark Poles. There were Newark Irish. I think, as kids, we experience these
differences locally, in the city, because we lived in neighborhoods that were
defined that way. And there was a certain amount of xenophobia. There was a
certain amount of hostility. But once one left the neighborhood, one wasn't a
Newark Jew, one was an American.

So it was a Jewish neighborhood, a Jewish grade school, a Jewish high school.
Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews everywhere. Strangely, I was thinking the other day,
but I never saw a Jew in a skullcap on the street in my life growing up.
Someone asked me about that recently, did I wear a skullcap as a kid. I said,
`Outrageous. I never would have thought of such a thing,' nor did anybody
else in the neighborhood. So here was this 100 percent Jewish neighborhood,
and I didn't know a single soul to wear a skullcap, which tells you a lot
about the fierce secularization, the fierce Americanization of my generation
and my parents' generation.

BIANCULLI: Philip Roth speaking with Terry Gross. Roth's novel "The Human
Stain" has just made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins. We'll continue
after this break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Our guest is Philip Roth. Like most novelists, he has drawn on
his life for his fiction. He also has been written about, often in an
unflattering way, in a 1996 memoir by his ex-wife, the actress Claire Bloom,
but that's a subject he declined to talk about when Terry spoke with him in
2000.

GROSS: This is a quote that you said back in 1987 that was published in US
News & World Report. You said, "I wouldn't want to live with a novelist.
Writers are highly voyeuristic and indiscreet. But the writer should be no
more ruthless with others than with himself. The same intensity of focus
should be turned inward as outward." Do you feel that friends of yours have
ever felt betrayed by you as a writer because you've tried to be honest? And
we all have secrets, and we don't want to be honest about our secrets. We
want to be secretive about our secrets.

Mr. ROTH: Let me counter with an anecdote about Czeslaw Milosz, who won the
Novel Prize for poetry, I guess, about 10 years ago. Milosz was asked a
similar question. I'll tell you what he said. He was asked about
the--because he also writes prose, and he'd written memoirs and so on, he was
asked about the relationship between a writer and his family and about this
issue of revealing secrets and betrayal. And Milosz said, `When a writer is
born into a family, the family is finished.' So the defense rests.

GROSS: Is that tough to live with?

Mr. ROTH: For the others?

GROSS: Well, for you, the writer, who, in being honest in your own way,
betrays the others?

Mr. ROTH: Well, you know, I don't know if it has so much to do with being
honest. You give us too much credit. I think it's just fascination. There's
no novelist worth his or her salt who isn't fascinated by the real and whose
job is founded and grounded in this fascination with the real thing. There's
an awful lot of stupid, childish awe in writers. People may think that you're
trying to reveal their secrets. You're sort of dumbstruck by their secrets
and by your own, of course, too. And there's far less vindictiveness than is
imagined on the part of the writer who writes about somebody's secret than
just this sort of stupid, childish awe of the human factor there.

So it isn't so much that one is pious about oneself or pious about being a
writer and saying, `Well, I have to be honest.' It's not that at all. It's
you're hypnotized, you're mesmerized, you're fascinated by the thing in
itself, and you want to present it. Now the other people may see it
otherwise. You know, they get hurt, I guess.

GROSS: Are there writers who you read or who you've known who, as a young
writer, gave you permission to write like yourself instead of trying to write
like the people you most admired of other generations or other eras?

Mr. ROTH: Sure. Sure. I have a great debt to several people. I suppose my
largest debt would be to Bellow, Saul Bellow, and I'm not alone in that, by
the way. And you don't have to be Jewish to be indebted to Saul Bellow
either. I suspect that half a dozen of my colleagues of my generation or a
little younger, a little older--a little younger, I would say--had their eyes
opened to literary freedom by Bellow, particularly by a book that appeared in
1954, "The Adventures of Augie March."

One doesn't write like, as you say--as you suggest, one doesn't write like
Bellow as a result, and it isn't that you then imitate this person. They
provide you with a kind of example of freedom, just as a youngster growing up
may admire some other kid, some older kid because of his or her freedom. I
think we all have had that experience. Likewise with a writer, you feel not
just the freedom, but the energy and, needless to say, the genius. Without
the genius, none of these things mean anything. But this genius has a kind of
freedom which inspires you.

The opening line of "Augie March" is rather famous--or was then. Nothing in
literature is famous any longer. But the opening line of Bellow's book is, `I
am an American, Chicago born.' What's interesting is that it doesn't begin,
`I'm an American Jew, Chicago born,' or, `I'm an American-born Jew in
Chicago.' Bellow, in a single sentence, freed a whole generation of Jewish
writers who came after him to write of the thing which was so powerful in
their lives, which was their Americanness. Now I'm speaking just thematically
of his importance. One can also speak of his verbal freedom, too, which was
equally inspiring.

GROSS: Philip Roth is my guest. Within the past decade or a little more than
that, you've had bypass surgery and also suffered a bad depression. I think
for a lot of people, when you go through something that's very kind of
physically life-changing, you look around at the rest of your life and figure,
`Well, what else do I want to change?' Did you make big changes in your life
after that?

Mr. ROTH: Let me think. I had quintuple bypass surgery back in 1989, it's
now 11 years. It was sort of out of the blue, and then all I knew was I was
swimming in my pool one day, and the next day I was having an operation. And
I was exhilarated by the operation. First of all, they'd saved my life. Very
exhilarating that is. And I walked around exhilarated for about six months.
And I think it re-energized me, strangely.

I did have a brutal depression seven or eight years ago, and, gee, all you
want to do is climb out of the hole, you know. And you're so content. You're
in a deep hole, and there are no rungs on the side to climb out with, and it's
a terrible experience. It descends almost like the other thing, out of the
blue, and you think you'll never get out. You feel like you're in a
straitjacket, except it's a mental straitjacket. And somehow you fight your
way out.

And after that, I think--I don't know, Terry, if I could really say that I
decided I would live differently. I'd just been through the damn ringer,
that's all, and you're glad to have survived and you just want to go on. You
just want to go on.

GROSS: Did it leave you any more or less of a believer in either
pharmaceutical therapy or talk therapy for a really brutal depression?

Mr. ROTH: I don't know that talk therapy helps. It's nice to have
sympathetic friends. That is a help. As far as professional talk, I don't
know that if you've had the real thing, that matters. Yeah, the drugs are
great, Prozac and those things. They can get you out of it, which is better
than the old days. You know, 25, 30 years ago people just sort of sat around
with these things, and it was pretty grim. It's pretty grim altogether. My
advice is not to have it.

GROSS: Thanks. We'll do our best. In "American Pastoral," Nathan Zuckerman
says, about the character whose story he's telling, he had learned the worst
lesson that life can teach: that it makes no sense. Do you feel that that's
the lesson of life, or that that's only the lesson of life when you're going
through a really bad depression or...

Mr. ROTH: Well, that line that you read is a telling one, to be sure, but
it's not about a character who's in depression. It's about Swede Levov after
his daughter blows up a building to protest the Vietnam War...

GROSS: Right.

Mr. ROTH: ...and his life is ruined, as though she's set the bomb off not at
the local post office, but in their living room. So I was talking about a
life that's overtaken by what I call elsewhere the uncontrolability of real
things, and I wasn't speaking then about depression.

GROSS: Right. But is that, do you feel like, life's lesson, or that only
some people are stuck in that predicament that life seems to make no sense?

Mr. ROTH: I suppose everybody has those minutes, hours and days when it
seems to make no sense, and you're blessed if you can escape those feelings.
I think it makes no sense, but you have to believe otherwise.

GROSS: You think life makes no sense?

Mr. ROTH: Not to me, it doesn't, but I pretend it does.

GROSS: And maybe try to give it sense in novels or explore the no sense that
it seems to have?

Mr. ROTH: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Both.

GROSS: Both.

Mr. ROTH: Yes. Quite seriously, both. Yeah.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. ROTH: My pleasure.

BIANCULLI: Philip Roth speaking with Terry Gross in 2000. Roth's new novel
is called "The Human Stain." It's just been released as a movie starring
Anthony Hopkins.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Profile: New box set of Nat "King" Cole's classic singles
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

A new box set of Nat "King" Cole's classic singles will be released next week.
Our jazz critic Kevin Whitehead will review it soon on FRESH AIR. Meanwhile,
here's a cut from that set recorded in 1951.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. NAT "KING" COLE: (Singing) Gee, it's great after bein' out late walkin'
my baby back home, arm in arm over meadow and farm, walkin' my baby back home.

We go 'long harmonizing a song or I'm recitin' a poem. Owls go by and they
give me the eye, walkin' my baby back home.

We stop for a while, she gives me a smile and snuggles her head on my chest.
We start in to pet and that's when I get her talcum all over my vest.

After I kinda straighten my tie, she has to borrow my comb. One kiss then I
continue again, I'm walking my baby back home.

BIANCULLI: Coming up, David Edelstein reviews the new film "Shattered Glass."
This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: New film "Shattered Glass"
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

In 1998, a reporter for the magazine Forbes Digital discovered that a feature
article on computer hackers by New Republic staff writer Stephen Glass was
entirely made up. An investigation by The New Republic found the 26 other
stories by Glass were frauds as well. The new film "Shattered Glass" by
first-time director Billy Ray is based on a Vanity Fair article by Buzz
Bissinger. Film critic David Edelstein has a review.

DAVID EDELSTEIN reporting:

It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't read enough stories about
the fabricator Stephen Glass and The New York Times Jayson Blair. Anyone
who's ever stared at a blank screen and thought, `How can I fill this?' knows
that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost any of us could make
stuff up or borrow someone else's words. So we hate the ones who give in.

Every time I feel a twinge of pity and think, `Let them alone finally.
They're human beings,' I'll read something infuriating. A piece of Glass'
novel "The Fabulist," say in which he portrays himself as a victim or I'll read
that Jayson Blair was at a restaurant agreeing to a midsix-figure deal for a
memoir called "Burning Down My Masters' House" when he saw Walter Cronkite and
strolled up and stuck out his hand, and then I'm back in one of those vampire
movies where you can't just drive a stake through their hearts; you have to
cut off their heads and stuff their mouths with garlic.

Billy Ray's "Shattered Glass" isn't a great piece of dramatic construction,
and I'm still wrestling with its fairly whopping omissions, but it satisfied
my blood lust. It's like a public stoning. The movie structure is both
simple and strange. It begins with Glass whom we know to be a fabricator or
there wouldn't be a movie being welcomed as a hero at his high-school
journalism class. As our anti-hero played by Hayden Christensen tells the
wide-eyed people of his illustrious career, the movie flashes back to his life
as a rising star at The New Republic where he wrote zeitgeist stories that
managed to be both snarky and gee whiz. Here's Glass at an editorial meeting
pitching a story that's an offshoot of the Mike Tyson ear-biting scandal.

(Soundbite from "Shattered Glass")

Mr. HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN: (As Stephen Glass) Every station on the radio was
talking about it, Mike Tyson biting Evander Holyfield, and these are supposed
to be news stations. And so on Tuesday, I started calling a few of them and I
finally got through to one, a Bible talk station in Kentucky, and I managed to
convince the screener that I was a behavioral psychologist who specializes in
human-on-human biting.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. CHRISTENSEN: (As Stephen Glass) I told the guy that I had done all this
extensive research on people who chomp flesh under extreme stress.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Unidentified Actress: What did they say?

Mr. CHRISTENSEN: (As Stephen Glass) They put me on the air. I took calls for
45 minutes.

Unidentified Actor: Oh, my God. Where does he find these people?

Mr. CHRISTENSEN: (As Stephen Glass) It's kind of stupid. I know. It's
silly. I'll probably just kill it.

EDELSTEIN: It's a masterful con, but the beauty part is that his
self-deprecation seems sincere. Glass turns in pieces and says things like,
`You hate it.' `It's the worst thing I ever wrote.' `I may have to kill
myself.' And he's constantly asking, `Are you mad at me?' He doesn't want
friends; he wants moms and dads and big sisters and brothers. He takes his
shoes off in the office like it's his family den. He joshes, he cuddles, he
teases. He's the kind of Jimmy Olsen type who can warm up a sterile corporate
environment.

Director Ray holds Glass at arm's length, though, and keeps both his process,
the actual act of fabricating those stories and his motivations off the
screen. We have to infer a lot. We hear that there's parental pressure for
Glass who comes from Chicago's affluent Highland Park neighborhood to be a star, a doctor or a lawyer, not a journalist. And I can understand why Ray doesn't
want to turn this into another movie about a kid being screwed up by mom and
dad, but it's obviously an enormous part of Glass' inner world. And without
it, the movie feels half-baked.

I don't know how much the general public will be interested in the lives of
the late editor Michael Kelly, Glass' nurturing surrogate father, or Kelly's
replacement, Chuck Lane, the cold withholding father, but there is plenty of
sadistic pleasure in watching him squirm when Forbes Digital reporter Adam
Penenberg, played by Steve Zahn, tries to do a follow-up to an article and
discovers there's no there there. You wonder when Glass will just say it,
`I'm a fraud,' but in the movie, he never does. He wants to be loved and
protected to the end.

The performances of Christensen, Chloe Sevigny as a doting colleague, Hank
Azaria as Kelly and especially Peter Sarsgaard as a prissy and humorless but
achingly vulnerable Chuck Lane are so good that for long stretches the
artifice drops away and you think you're watching a fly-on-the-wall
documentary. Only the movie's climax is suspect. Chuck Lane becoming a
stand-up and cheer hero for firing Glass as if there's an editor in the world
who wouldn't fire a writer for fabricating. Can you imagine a Jayson Blair
movie that builds to a standing ovation for Howell Raines?

It's an uplifting but bogus touch. In fact, it's pure Stephen Glass.

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is the film critic for the online magazine Slate.

(Credits)

BIANCULLI: For Terry Gross, I'm David Bianculli.

(Soundbite of music)

Unidentified Singers: We're going out tonight to break some things. We dyed
our lemonade and ate your sweets. We'll set your shoes on fire and then your
hair. We're kind of ugly, but we don't care. Scooby dooby, dooby.
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