Philip Roth.

The phrase “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” has been a rallying cry in music since Neil Young crooned it over 30 years ago. But it’s writers who seem to best embody the sentiment: the burnouts who did themselves in, like Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, tend to be romanticized long after their deaths by those who believe an untimely end completes some sort of narrative of depression; the ones who fade, the writers who keep pushing out words till their last breath, may not be eulogized, but at least they get to spend their golden years doing what they (presumably) love.

Last month, Philip Roth, one of America’s greatest living writers and its reigning curmudgeon, took a very different route toward career conclusion: he quit. The 79-year-old author of 27 novels, dozens of short stories and countless essays, and the recipient of nearly every major literary award save the Nobel Prize, told an interviewer for the French publication Les Inrocks, “To tell you the truth, I’m done.” His 2010 novel Nemesis would be his last book.

Surprisingly, it took a month for the American media to pick up on the news that one of its literary lions was putting down his pen. Salon “broke” the news last week by using an Internet program to translate Mr. Roth’s quotes into English. And then things got stranger: there was no big blowout to celebrate a life in letters, no gold watch presented to the retiree, no jersey hung from the rafters. His retirement was a quiet affair—he had done enough, he said, and didn’t want to bang out books anymore. He is one of the rare novelists able to say, “I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough!”

But if you’re one of the most acclaimed authors alive, the type who can walk into a bookstore and grab five new works of fiction with a blurb claiming the author is influenced by your work, does it really matter, after all this time, that you want to stop? For most writers, the answer would be no; everybody deserves to call it quits on his own terms, and it’s better to ride into the sunset than to write garbage books simply because you’re a household name. But in the case of Mr. Roth, there is something meaningful in his quiet exit. It closes the door on the Golden Era of Jewish-American Literature.

To say that the postwar era has been good for Jewish writers is an understatement. Jewish-American literature after the Second World War has both changed the course of American letters and helped forge a new, post-Holocaust Jewish identity. Mr. Roth is part of the school of novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists and songwriters that includes Grace Paley, Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Bernard Malamud, Leonard Cohen, Cynthia Ozick, Edward Lewis Wallant, Arthur Miller, Joseph Heller, Leonard Michaels and the Canadian-born, American-raised Saul Bellow, whose opening line to his 1953 breakout novel The Adventures of Augie March is not only of the same iconic stature as Moby-Dick’s “Call me Ishmael” but reads like a rallying cry for Jewish assimilation just a few years removed from Hitler’s massacre: “I am an American, Chicago born.”

In one sense, Mr. Roth’s exit is merely symbolic. The light of the Golden Age has been fading for years—but his announcement is an extinguishing of the embers. In 1977, several years before Mr. Roth had published a single Zuckerman novel, Irving Howe, another of the great Jewish-American intellectual voices, wrote that “American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point.” He went on to say that most American Jewish writing up until that point had drawn heavily from the immigrant experience, that it “must suffer a depletion of recourses, a thinning-out of materials and memories.” Howe believed that Jewish writers had become removed from centuries of suffering, and the mother tongue of Yiddish was being forgotten. Mr. Roth himself was the child of first-generation American parents, but the shtetl was never far behind. His earlier writing, along with the work of many of his contemporaries, gives a glimpse into the growing pains of a culture that was finally able to stop worrying about Spanish Inquisitions, pogroms, Hitler.

But Philip Roth’s retirement is significant because he is the Jewish-American writer. His lackluster books from the last decade or so notwithstanding, his body of work represents the most extensive document of the Jewish experience in postwar America. The short story “Defenders of the Faith,” collected in his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959) is about a Jewish soldier who tries to manipulate his sergeant—a fellow Jew—by preying on their shared ethnic backgrounds to keep from getting shipped off to the Pacific. It caused an uproar in the Jewish community for its portrayal of the soldier, Sheldon Grossbart, which many felt upheld the long-standing stereotype that Jews are cunning and greedy. Mr. Roth saw it differently, stating in 1963 that his character was “represented not as the stereotype of the Jew, but the Jew who acts like the stereotype, offering back to his enemies their vision of him[.]”

Six years later came the commercial success of Portnoy’s Complaint, a novel that prompted its own share of controversy. Life magazine pointed to “the book’s pungent language” and “its preoccupations, foremost among which is the terrible sin of onanism.” Alexander Portnoy masturbating with a piece of raw liver was on par with anything Lenny Bruce had thought up. After that book, Mr. Roth churned out at least one great novel in every decade since the release of Goodbye, Columbus. He held up the center of American fiction, Jewish or otherwise.

So what can we expect in his absence? Mr. Roth’s announcement comes at a time when post-Golden Age American Jewish literature is reaching its own awkward adolescence. The compulsive masturbation in Portnoy’s Complaint made subversion the centerpiece of Mr. Roth’s style, and it seems as if today’s younger American-born Jewish writers are trying to one-up his crudeness. The title story of Nathan Englander’s 2012 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank focuses on two Jewish couples, one Hasidic and the other secular, getting high and drunk and playing the “Anne Frank game”: they try to guess which of their gentile neighbors would hide them in the event of a second Holocaust. The entire book follows Jewish characters transforming from victim to victimizers in a far less subtle way than Sheldon Grossbart in “Defenders of the Faith.” But Mr. Englander’s “Anne Frank game” is tame in comparison with Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy, a novel, also released earlier this year, about an everyday schmuck named Solomon Kugel. In it, our David Kepesh-esque antihero buys a farmhouse and finds, to his surprise, that a woman who claims to be Anne Frank is alive and living in his attic. This is a literary gotcha at least comparable with the absurdity of Mr. Roth’s novella The Breast, in which Kepesh wakes up to discover he has turned into, well, a 155-pound breast.  (An Anne Frank-like character also appears in Mr. Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 novel The Ghost Writer.) But after the initial shock value, the obviousness of Mr. Auslander’s metaphor—that Jews are unable to move past the systematic death of six million of their people—grows stale. Reviews of the book were mixed, but many of them cited Philip Roth as an influence.

So what, exactly, does it mean to be influenced by Philip Roth? His body of work is so diverse that he’s a presence every writer must assimilate and, if successful, live down. Joshua Cohen’s 800-page 2010 novel Witz begins with a Rothian gimmick—the protagonist is the last Jew on Earth after a mysterious plague wipes out the world’s chosen people, making him a bizarre update of the solitary but virile man who inhabits so much of Mr. Roth’s fiction. But from there the book is more concerned with language itself, a stream of consciousness of made-up words and impenetrable sentences; it reads, at times, like a deliberate swipe at what Mr. Roth called, in his 1963 essay “Writing About Jews,” the “promiscuous instincts” of modern man.

Stepping away from his more obvious descendants, it becomes clear how inescapable Mr. Roth’s style has become. At a glance, Sheila Heti, a Canadian of Hungarian-Jewish descent, whose most recent novel, How Should a Person Be?, includes, more than once, the decidedly anti-Rothian dismissal “just another man who wants to teach me something,” does not seem a likely candidate for inheriting Mr. Roth’s mantle. But her book is filled, even unconsciously, with Rothian gestures. First, there’s the graphic sex. Consider the two writers’ dueling takes on fellatio. Mr. Roth, from My Life As a Man: “Her eyes leveled on his exposed member and her tongue out and moving. ‘I want to be your whore,’ she whispered to him (without prompting too), while on the back terrace her Mother told his mother how adorable Sharon looked in the winter coat they’d bought for her that afternoon.” Ms. Heti: “I know boyfriends get really excited when they can touch the soft flesh at the back of your throat. At these times, I just try to breathe through my nose and not throw up on their cock. I did vomit a little the other day, but I kept right on sucking.” Then there is the blurring of fiction and autobiography, a theme that haunts many contemporary novelists. “Sheila Heti” is the protagonist of How Should a Person Be?, just as “Philip Roth” is the hero of The Plot Against America, navigating the halls of Weequahic High School, where the real Philip Roth got a diploma.

The reviews of Ms. Heti’s novel—and there were plenty—did not lump her into this tricky category of Jewish Fiction, and certainly didn’t mention Mr. Roth, whose impress ranges from obvious to subliminal in most contemporary fiction. There is still a lingering obsession with what makes a Jewish writer or a Jewish book—an idea that Mr. Roth helped form—but his exit from the literary world certainly puts an end to the era of the Jewish Writer as we know it. He may not have been as well known without the visibility awarded to a Jew writing about Jews in the years after World War II, but as a lesson to anybody who tries to label himself or herself a Jewish Writer in these post-Roth years, Mr. Roth’s work will be remembered for its quality first. Perhaps this is his greatest achievement. He made Jewish fiction mainstream, allowing Jewish writers to focus on something other than just being Jewish.

editorial@observer.com

Out of nowhere in Rick Moody's new novel The Four Fingers of Death, there is a gay sex scene involving two astronauts flying on a rocket ship to Mars. "There was a sharp stabbing sensation, sort of how I imagine it must feel to find your innards impaled on a pike," Mr. Moody writes. "This was the Big Bang of interplanetary sex." The scene goes on for almost 10 pages, ending with the line, "The two of us breaststroked around the capsule, attempting to swallow the afterglow of our profane and inadvisable entanglement."

Most striking about Mr. Moody's scene is the lack of restraint. Mr. Moody is not alone. Two thousand and ten has been a summer of strange, dirty sex in American fiction. Writers are dealing with the topic in all its awkward, gruesome and (one hopes) lascivious detail. Fictional sex in 2010 is as unhinged as Norman Mailer's apocalyptic orgasm. Forty years after the old guard's fictional promiscuity, the mere presence of sex in fiction has long ceased to be interesting. Authors now focus less on the social implications of writing about sex and instead on the thematic possibilities of the act itself.

This summer's novels run through the entire spectrum of possible intercourse: missionary, ménage à trois, bondage, torture and every variant in between. In all instances, sex is not an aesthetic decoration, a superfluous indulgence or a signal of an author's bravery; it drives plot and defines character. The scenes are highly stylized in erotic, often gritty language: the 18-year-old performing oral sex on a music executive old enough to be her father in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad; the virile Sam Sheppard's extra-marital affairs in Adam Ross's wonderful debut, Mr. Peanut; Benjamin Israelien's tongue cleaved to the clitoris of a woman impersonating his mother in Joshua Cohen's Witz. The sex scene, as it becomes more and more pornographic, paradoxically shifts from hormonal to metaphorical. The dirtier the sex, the more essential it is to the story.

Take Bret Easton Ellis, hardly a prude. In Imperial Bedrooms, he writes one of his most troubling depictions of sex, but also his least gratuitous, to the extent that the scene allows us to better understand Clay, his antihero. Clay gives two young prostitutes-a boy and a girl-cupcakes laced with laxatives. "Smeared with shit," Clay recalls, "I was pushing my fist into the girl and her lips were clinging tightly around my wrist and she seemed to be trying to make sense of me while I stared back at her flatly, my arm sticking out of her, my fist clenching and unclenching." Far from sex for sex's sake, Clay is finally enacting the physical violence that he has wanted to perform on his fellow characters since we first met him in 1985's Less Than Zero.

It is no accident that many of the writers offering the most unreserved representations of sex have expressed anxiety about the state of the novel and of publishing, particularly the increasing digitization and consequent simplification of language. Gary Shteyngart in his excellent Super Sad True Love Story interprets this directly through the juxtaposition of Eunice Park's Gchat-speak emails with the long form prose of Lenny Abramov's diary entries, creating what is, essentially, a critique of technology-mediated writing. Lenny's jarring eloquence-"She must have sensed just how much her youth and freshness meant to me, a man who lived in death's anteroom and could barely stand the light and heat of his brief sojourn on earth. I licked and licked, breathing in the slight odor of something authentic and human"-is mirrored by Grace's crude e-chatter-"I met this old, gross guy at a party yesterday and we got really drunk and I sort of let him go down on me."

If Mr. Shteyngart asserts the threat of technology's stunted sentence structures to oversimplify language, Jonathan Franzen in Freedom expresses the reverse of the notion. Sexual desire in Freedom is unhinged in emails, phone calls and instant messages, but in practice is often adolescent or tame ("It was fine, having sex with him"). When really pleasurable intercourse occurs, it is as vulgar as the digital version of the act. Patty and Walter, the novel's central troubled couple, finally throw caution to the wind after two decades of polite lovemaking, but Walter's newly minted experimentation in bed (actually, on the floor) is prefaced as "the violent actions which, without her consent, would have been a rapist's." Still, "instead of her usual demure little sighs of encouragement, she was giving forth large screams."

Sex in fiction is, more and more, a device through which authors experiment and take risks. A participant in the second highly pornographic scene in Mr. Moody's book unknowingly sums it up quite succinctly: "Would I be coy about a device that's all about turning the tables so that what's wrong is right," Mr. Moody writes about a decidedly different kind of device, "and what was bottom is now top?"

The writer Joshua Cohen, author of the recent novel Witz, was at a bar recently telling a girl he'd met an hour and a half earlier about a family member who was being treated for cancer. The next day, he saw that she was writing about it on her blog. And even though all she said was that she hoped Mr. Cohen's relative recovered, it made him queasy, like he was living in Soviet Russia.

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"Whenever I say something to a person, I'm trying my best to consider just that person, not that person's larger audience or constituency," Mr. Cohen said. "I think if I start thinking that way, I'll become even more of a loathsome person than I already am. That's essentially living like a politician, or a Supreme Court justice during confirmation hearings, where you can't give your opinion, you just want to get by."

Mr. Cohen, 29, has friends who have become so reserved out of fear of being quoted on acquaintances' blogs that when he is in casual social situations with them, he is self-conscious about looking like an irritating loudmouth in comparison.

"I fear becoming, through really no fault of mine, a caricature," he said. "It's my natural personality to say what I feel, and I feel like more and more, because so many other people are guarding their tongues, I'm going to look like some old obnoxious Jew, just screaming at people. It used to be that you were your opinions. Now it's almost like you only consist of your discretion."

What are people so afraid of? They are not always sure. Sometimes it's that they don't want to offend someone. Other times, they don't want a person they only kind of know finding out that they were talking or thinking about them. Everyone just wants to be in control, but control is getting harder and harder to come by. "It is a fear of unknown repercussions," said Brian Stelter, a media reporter for The New York Times. "The repercussions are not obvious here."

So much for the new transparency. Though Web evangelists will tell you that society is on the verge of a new era in which everyone is always honest and secrets don't exist, the reality is that New Yorkers are keeping more from each other than ever before and watching what they say with unprecedented vigilance. They have more secrets than they ever did, and they have never been more afraid or calculated in their day-to-day interactions.

Thus, what constitutes a secret has expanded to include even the most seemingly innocuous details, and the circumstances under which the disclosure of facts can turn into social inconveniences have proliferated. This phenomenon threatens to destroy personalities, or at least render us dull to talk to.

Reporters have been dealing with this conundrum as long as there have been newspapers. In recent years, though, it's grown far beyond journalistic circles, as the range of circumstances under which anything can potentially be made public grows larger. It takes on different forms, of course. "Don't write about this on your blog." "Don't tweet what I just said." "Don't mention I was here if you write about this party." "Don't tag me if you put that picture on Facebook." "If you link to my blog, don't use my real name."

Mr. Stelter said he's probably not going to be saying "off the record" to his wife. Short of that, he said, he and his friends tend to stay on their toes. When Mr. Stelter, 24, went out for brunch a few weeks ago with a group of friends-among them a TV producer, a lawyer, a magazine columnist and a couple of bloggers-it didn't take long for someone to stop the conversation and make sure that everything said at the table was going to stay at the table.

"People were so nervous," Mr. Stelter said. "Not even because they were saying inappropriate things, but because we just don't always know the parameters of these conversations."

So what were they talking about, anyway? The story of Dave Weigel, of course, the columnist who recently resigned from The Washington Post after coming under fire for emails he sent to a list-serv. Though the list was meant to be a confidential forum for friends in the media to discuss current events among themselves, Mr. Weigel's emails were leaked. His is a cautionary tale, not only for journalists but for anyone who has ever used email to express thoughts that weren't intended for a large audience.

Cases like Mr. Weigel's, in which an indiscreet remark made public results in some degree of ruin, have turned New Yorkers into a timid breed of paranoids, always hedging and always holding back. We have seen people get raked through the coals online for doing nothing essentially wrong-remember that poor Condé Nast intern who was photographed recently at the 4 Times Square cafeteria and mocked on Facebook for his tight pants and silly shoes?-and we have internalized the notion that saying or doing the wrong thing in the presence of the wrong person can have devastating consequences. It doesn't help that there are vultures out there like Andrew Breitbart, who has offered a $100,000 reward to anyone willing to leak the full archive of JournoList, the list-serv that got Mr. Weigel in trouble.

"We've lived for about five years sharing everything and saying everything out loud, and we keep hearing about people who suffer the consequences of doing that," Mr. Stelter said. "We're at the point where 'off the record' is shorthand for 'I'm gonna say something that's gonna surprise you,' or 'I'm gonna say something that might be taken the wrong way.'"

"The making sure it's O.K., the asking, is always kind of sad because it essentially implies that I don't really know people's boundaries," said Meaghan O'Connell, the 25-year-old outreach director of Tumblr, who is known for blogging in exuberant detail about her personal life. "I want people to trust me, obviously, and not feel like I am going to humiliate them on my Tumblr or say things they wouldn't be comfortable with."

People have asked Ms. O'Connell more than once to remove posts from her Tumblr, and the experience has been excruciating for her every time.

"It always makes me feel really awful," she said. "Not because, you know, I am so sad the world won't be able to hear this hilarious thing my mom said, but more because it is a bit of an implication that I didn't consider my mom's feelings enough when I Twittered that she wasn't wearing any underwear."

HRAG VARTANIAN IS an art blogger at Hyperallergic so dedicated to writing about his personal life that he had to warn his husband when they started dating that he couldn't dictate what he did and didn't blog about.

"I had to make it clear and say, 'Look, just so you know, everything is fair game,'" Mr. Vartanian said. "It's just the nature of what I do. You're just gonna have to deal with it."

Mr. Vartanian, 37, balks when acquaintances tell him not to tweet about something they've said, or declare a banal observation to be "off the record."

"I don't understand it at all, especially when it's something as simple as 'so-and-so dated so-and-so but don't tell them I told you,'" Mr. Vartanian said. "I'm like, who cares? Something simple like that? We're in New York City! I mean, everyone's dated everyone, you know? It's not a huge deal, but people do that all the time."

As far as Mr. Vartanian is concerned, if something really happened, people shouldn't be embarrassed to discuss it. "I'm like, either it's a fact or it isn't!" he explained.

But even evangelists of blanket transparency like Mr. Vartanian admit that they're keeping more to themselves than ever before.

"I'm starting to think about it more and more-I love to joke around and be snarky, but I'm being much more conscientious about it than I used to be because you realize people can take that and transform it," he said.

For Nathan Heller, a 26-year-old writer for Slate, there are rewards in resisting the pressure to be unobjectionable.

"A few weeks ago, I went to see an illustrious 60-something poet read his work at a jazz club-he's done this for years; it's his thing-and the poems he read carried him into this uncomfortable, sometimes confessional-type place," Mr. Heller said in an email. "He seemed to come apart a little at the microphone. It was a sharp, immediate performance, and a moving one, because it was so candid. And I realized that I couldn't imagine anyone our age doing this, ever-not something that raw and exposed. Which alarmed me."

Mr. Heller cited a remark a colleague of his at Slate made to him not long ago: "Tweet that, coward! You make a career by getting on people's shitlists, not by staying off them."

Mr. Heller noted that he was paraphrasing, and declined to disclose the name of his colleague, just in case.

lneyfakh@observer.com

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