Novel by Henry Roth

[innopac]

"An American Type," a posthumous novel by Henry Roth, who died in 1995, came to publication largely because of the editing of Willing Davidson, a fiction editor at The New Yorker." New York Times article.

"The writer Henry Roth was a tortured, hard-luck case who at the end life enjoyed an unexpected redemption. Blocked for decades, full of doubt and self-loathing, he began writing again in his late 80s, even though crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and finished four new novels, two of which he lived to see into print before his death in 1995. Now, almost miraculously, there is a fifth, “An American Type,” which W. W. Norton will publish on June 7."

[dirac]

Thank you for posting this, innopac. I didn't take much away from 'Call It Sleep' myself but it has had a powerful effect on many. It sounds as if the editor did a lot of stitching together:

Roth wrote using what he called an aleatory method, Mr. Davidson explained. He’d work on a scene or a character for as long as it interested him and then jump to something else, not necessarily chronologically. Batch 2 includes several versions of the same incidents from the 1930s, as well as scenes set in an Albuquerque nursing home, where Roth lived unhappily for a while after Muriel’s death in 1990, and transcripts of phone calls he had with friends about the Persian Gulf war. So Mr. Davidson’s first step was simply to make a chronology on a spreadsheet and to start organizing the material.