Philip Roth
America across the river

A great novelist has bequeathed his book collection to a struggling public library

Books & artsNov 5th 2016 edition

ONE of the reading rooms of the public library in Newark, New Jersey, where the teenage Philip Roth fired his imagination, is an events room now, empty of books. Another is a dusty storeroom for the library’s collection of art-history volumes. Hardly anyone reads them.

Erected by public demand in the 1890s as one of the first civic buildings in what was then a swelling industrial town near the mouth of the Hudson river, the library is now as much an information service for the poor as a books repository. Half the 10,000 people who pass through the main library and its seven branches each week are looking for help getting access to social services, or to type out a job application, or to learn English. This is important work, but not what its ambitious architects—who modelled the library on a 15th-century Florentine palazzo—had in mind. Paying for the library is a constant worry; its main benefactor, the city, is one of America’s poorest. During the recession in 2008, the library had its annual funding of $11m slashed by a third.

To this pathetic tale of urban decline, Mr Roth has added an interesting twist. The 83-year-old novelist, who used the library as a student and later researched his monumental “American Trilogy” in one of its reference rooms, plans to bequeath his personal library to it. Mr Roth has annotated many of the 4,000 books; they are a record of how, as well as what, the novelist spent a lifetime reading. It should be compelling to scholars and thrilling to his fans.

Timothy Crist, president of the library’s board, is naturally cock-a-hoop. He talks of the library becoming a global “literary destination”. “There are probably as many Roth fans in France as there are in America,” he says gleefully. The unloved art-history tomes will be shifted and their high-ceilinged storeroom lavishly renovated to accommodate Mr Roth’s gift.

To evoke the author’s Connecticut house, the redesign of the library will have a modernist twist. Mr Roth is also donating a couple of his writing desks, reading chairs and a long refectory table, at which people will be able to peruse his books pretty much as he did. The books will be available to all. Tentative fundraising for the project has been “very encouraging” says Mr Crist; so much so, that he hopes to make this part of a much grander, $20m refurbishment of the entire library. Architects’ plans have already been approved.

It is a splendid, quietly subversive, gesture by Mr Roth; a rich university would have paid handsomely for his books. It is also a reminder of how touchingly respectful of Newark, transformed though it has been by immigration, deindustrialisation and riots, he always is. Not for him or any of his fictional alter-egos the traditional contempt of the homeward-looking literary exile—of James Joyce for Ireland, the “old sow that eats her farrow”. Before entering the library, you pass through the straggly inner-city park outside it, where Neil Klugman, the librarian protagonist of Mr Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus”, acknowledges his “deep knowledge of Newark, an attachment so rooted that it could not help but branch out into affection”. The real Mr Roth has explained his bequest as motivated by a “long-standing sense of gratitude to the city where I was born”.

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "America across the river"

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