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

“You hear about these big contracts coming in, and it whets your appetite,” said Leah McLaren, a columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail, who landed a book contract with HarperCollins Canada in 2003 for her chick-lit novel, The Continuity Girl. “You start to think, ‘This is my lottery ticket …. It could be optioned for a movie or become a huge best-seller!’”

Indeed, securing a deal with one of the many esteemed editors at publishing houses like Knopf or Doubleday or FSG seems like fulfilling a kind of New York–specific American dream. Visions of six-figure contracts, KGB readings and TV appearances dance through writers’ heads. Even better: no more office, no more boss.

“But then, it could completely disappear and sell five copies,” added Ms. McLaren whose own book was published to little fanfare as a paperback original in the States this spring. “And you’ll never be heard from again. You’ll disappear. And that’s the real risk of writing a book.”

Slideshow

My Book Deal
Ruined My Life

But just think for a minute, by way of comparison, if a book contract is a lottery ticket …. Evelyn Adams, who won $5.4 million in the New Jersey lottery in 1985 and 1986, now lives in a trailer. William (Bud) Post won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery in 1988, but now survives on food stamps and his Social Security check. Suzanne Mullins, a $4.2 million Virginia lottery winner, is now deeply in debt to a company that lent her money using the winnings as collateral.

Could such doom await lucky-seeming, envy-enspiring book writers?

Look at Jessica Cutler, a.k.a. Washingtonienne, the D.C. sex blogger who was paid a six-figure advance for her novel, based on the experiences she chronicled on her blog. Suffering under the weight of a lawsuit from an ex-boyfriend, who claims to have been humiliated by her writing, she has now filed for bankruptcy. She can’t even pay her Am-Ex bill.

Then there are the truly epic downfalls of authors like James Frey, whose fabricated memoir caused his life (and his seven-figure two-book deal with Riverhead) to shatter into a million little pieces. Now he’s writing two novels without a contract and posting on the blog and message boards on his Web site, bigjimindustries.com—the literary equivalent of living in a trailer park.

And even before the potential post-publication humiliation, there’s deadline pressure; crippling self-doubt; diets of Entenmann’s pastries and black coffee; self-made cubicles structured with piles of books, papers and unpaid bills; night-owl tendencies; failed relationships; unanswered phone calls; weight gain; poverty; and, of course, exhaustion.

So forget the American dream! Getting a book deal seems more like a nightmare.

In 2002, Daniel Smith, a former Atlantic Monthly staff editor, received the news that he’d gotten a book contract for Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination in a sweltering phone booth at the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat in woodsy New Hampshire. “There was no cell-phone reception at the time, so you had to get into these poorly ventilated—meaning there was no ventilation—phone booths. You sweat like a pig in there, and that’s how I got the news. And it was extremely exciting,” Mr. Smith told The Observer.

Mr. Smith’s book was inspired by the experiences of his father, an attorney who was ashamed that he heard voices in his head. He passed away in 1998. “I basically signed up to think about my father and his most painful secret every day for the next three years. I basically could sign myself up for mourning every day for three years, which is really not a fun way to spend someone’s life,” Mr. Smith said. “Thinking about insanity every day for many years also is very uncomfortable, because it’s like thinking about death—it’s one of our two greatest fears.”

At one point, said Mr. Smith, the writing was so miserable, “I thought about getting into painting houses or digging ditches, doing anything other than writing—making watches or something like that.”

Mr. Smith faced the problem that many authors struggle with: being stuck with their subjects for one, three, even 10 years at a time.

“I want this woman out of my life so much it’s ridiculous,” said Michael Anderson, 55, who has been researching and writing a book about the playwright Lorraine Hansberry for HarperCollins since 1998. “It has been, in essence, 10 years, and sometimes it seems like, ‘My God, why isn’t this thing done yet?’ But at times I think, ‘My God, it’s only been 10 years.’ I never understood why biographies took so much time; now I’m in awe that any of them get finished.”

When he received his contract, Mr. Anderson was working full-time as an editor at The New York Times Book Review, a job he had for 17 years. He figured he would try to take four years to finish the book and publish it by his 50th birthday. “But that was just naïve,” Mr. Anderson said.

He left The New York Times in 2005, sequestering himself in his Washington Heights apartment to devote himself to the book.

For months, each night, he would be startled from his slumber at 3:30 in the morning in the midst of a thought about Hansberry. “She’s a nice woman, but I don’t want to be with her all the time,” Mr Anderson said.

Nathan Englander spent close to a decade on his second novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, released this April. “I was getting upset about all the articles—you know, ‘After a decade of silence … ,’” Mr. Englander, 37, said in an ominous tone during a phone interview.

“Now I look around and wonder—it’s hard to remember who I was all those years,” Mr. Englander added. “I don’t care about anything when I’m in the work; nothing else matters at all …. People I lost touch with, I’m trying to get back to. I’ll write them, ‘Thank you for your letter in 1999. Here’s what’s been going on.’ You work your way through to get familiar with normal life.”

Aside from losing touch with friends, Mr. Englander also struggled with everyday life.

“I look down and see that I’m only wearing one shoe,” Mr. Englander said in a recent interview with the blog Bookslut. “Recognizing it, I think, How can I walk around like this? Why would I walk around with only one shoe? … Why isn’t that shelf organized, or why didn’t I write that person back or … I can’t understand why the person that is me didn’t do these things. And to that question my mother responds, ‘Because you were like a tortured madman working on this book,’ and I remember and say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s why.’”

“Spouses get very jealous of the biographer’s subject, because it really is what you’re thinking about all the time,” Mr. Anderson explained. “I’ve often thought that if I were married, my wife would’ve sued for divorce.”

The freedom of setting one’s own schedule, of course, is another gift of the book contract—for some, it’s the very motivation to pitch a book in the first place. Work for a few hours, go to yoga, work a little more, eat a sandwich …. It’s a fantasy of independence, without daily or weekly deadlines imposed from above, without being picked at by your nosy co-worker. But then…You miss the co-worker: the ruminations on last night’s Sopranos at the coffee machine, the bitching about deadlines over lunch. You even long for their Z100 sing-alongs and screeching renditions of “Since U Been Gone.”

“I found, when I quit The Times, that the biggest problem is loneliness,” Mr. Anderson admitted.

“Basically, I was giving myself panic attacks in the beginning,” said Ms. McLaren, who took a leave of absence from her column-writing job to move to an isolated farmhouse outside Toronto and write her novel in solitude. “As a newspaper writer, people were always walking over to your desk and being like, ‘Where is it? How’s it coming?’ All that was taken away—there’s no deadline.”

And then there’s the self-loathing.

“You’re not letting people read it as you write it. Nobody has ever read what you’re doing. It could be terrible. It could be brilliant. And you start to think, ‘Oh God, this is a complete piece of shit that couldn’t be published—nobody is going to read it.’ But then you have a sandwich and go, ‘I am a genius and I’m going to win the Booker Prize.’”

Rachel Sklar, 34, the media and special-projects editor for the Huffington Post, barricaded herself her in Lower East Side apartment to work on her book, Jew-ish: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and All the Ish in Between, a humorous “guidebook on being a contemporary Jew,” according to Ms. Sklar. “It’s not like you can pack all that into a pamphlet if you’re going to do it right. You can’t just wing a chapter on the Talmud.” (Originally due in mid-February, the book’s deadline has since been pushed twice—once to May and now to mid-September.)

Ms. Sklar took six weeks off from her blogging job to uniform herself in fuzzy sweatpants, tie her hair into a bun, surround herself in books from the library and Amazon.com, guzzle Diet Coke and immerse herself in Jewry.

“The stack of books kept me where I was. I wasn’t going out, I wasn’t shopping …. I berated myself and may have had a few meltdowns. Well, I definitely had a few meltdowns. But you know, a friend of mine came over at 1:30 [after] a movie premiere with a six-pack of Diet Coke and a box of cupcakes, and it was the greatest pick-me-up ever.”

“The interesting thing is that it’s kind of freeing when you have a real good excuse to tell people no,” said Anna Holmes, 33, the current managing editor of Jezebel, a Gawker-sponsored female-centric blog, and editor of Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters from the End of the Affair. “But there was also that fear that the more I said no, at the end of the whole thing I wouldn’t have any friends left.”

Ms. Holmes stayed bundled in her apartment for about a year between 2001 and 2002, leaving her job as a writer at Glamour to cobble together the book.

“If you have an office job, at least it’s walking to and from the subway every day. When you sit in your house, you seriously gain weight,” Ms. Holmes said in a phone interview from her Long Island City apartment. “I’m eating my Greek yogurt and steamed vegetables—I’m trying to be good about what I’m eating. But I’m still like, ‘I’m getting really soft.’ My idea before the book came out was that I was going to diet, because I had gotten flabby, so that I’d look better to promote it. But that didn’t happen. I was quote unquote dieting for I think two weeks, but I just couldn’t do it.”

After all the months of writing, editing and wrangling permissions to reprint letters, Caroll & Graf released the book in August 2002. But the last thing Ms. Holmes wanted to do was celebrate the publication.

“I was really tired. I wasn’t so much physically tired, I was mentally tired. At the exact moment I was supposed to be promoting it, the last thing I wanted to do was talk about it. I had to get all excited about this thing that I had just given birth to. It was like postpartum depression…

“I had a hard time getting myself back into my quote-unquote normal life, because I actually started enjoying my [own] company so much and the solitude of it all. I didn’t even want to go out,” Ms. Holmes continued. “I still tend to kind of want to be at home and read and, you know, [become] a cat lady, with my cats.”

And what about that holy grail—the advance? Even the smallest advance can be justified to death as the ticket out of your office job or bartending gig. But is the money that publishers pay most writers enough to make the suffering worth it?

That money, of course, isn’t just for rent and ham sandwiches and Oreos. It’s also for the sky-high freelance taxes (about 37 percent of any untaxed income will be commandeered by Uncle Sam), agent’s fees, fax and copy tabs at the library, travel for research trips and any other number of things. Think about it: $100,000 is actually more like $65,000 after taxes—not bad. But then there’s the 15 percent agent’s cut (another $15,000), leaving you about $50,000. For a year, that’s a livable salary. But once other book expenses are taken into account—like permissions, travel, copies and the like—you’re looking at a modest pile rather than a mountain. There’s really not much left to enjoy—especially if your work stretches on for years.

“When I hear a book deal, I think, ‘Oh, that person made a 100 grand.’ When I have a low-five-figure advance, I call it, like, a small gift, I suppose,” said Ms. Holmes.

She also learned that her publisher wouldn’t pay for the rights to print the breakup letters she wanted to include in the collection. “The advance I got was not money that I could live on; it was money that had to be used to pay permissions for the book,” she said.

Although Mr. Smith said he was able to survive on his advance, he admits that those six-figure deals can quickly dwindle away over the three or four years it takes to write a book. “You’re basically making 30 or 40 grand a year, and that’s not that great of a salary …. It’s really not as much as it seems. These numbers can be very deceptive.”

Yet, still, the dreamers dream. Brendan Sullivan, 25, moved to New York after studying creative writing at Kenyon College in Ohio.

He hasn’t landed a book deal for his novel, but is determined to find a publisher. “Writing has ruined my life and cost me many, many girlfriends,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I have thrown away several careers and one college degree to spend my time working in bars, D.J.’ing in bars and drinking my rejection letters away. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, and I’ve made many of them since I started …. I also abandoned my agent with words harsher than those I’ve saved for lost loves.”

Mr. Sullivan has held 27 jobs to support his writing career, from selling chapstick on the street to being a night guard in an art gallery (“That was my favorite job ever, because I just sat in a chair and read novels all day,” Mr. Sullivan added.)

He is currently working on his second novel. His first one, well, “There are eight drafts of it—they’re in my basement right now,” he said in a phone interview from his Fort Greene apartment. He trashed the novel after he got into a public fight with his first agent and decided to start anew. “You have to learn how to suppress your gag reflex in order to get anything out. Like in love, you make a lot of mistakes and you learn from them.”

Indeed, despite the heartbreak, the loneliness, the trashed drafts, the rejected proposals, writers will continue to reach for the golden ticket, the fulfillment of their American dream.

“In terms of the most joyous life to have in the world, in terms of pleasure receptors, it might be like being a heroin addict: It’s the most pleasurable thing that you could choose, if you have that constant access,” said Mr. Englander, before hanging up to head to the coffee shop and write. “I’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah, it almost killed me,’ but I’m saying that in the most positive way, because it’s all I want to do.”

THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES
By Nathan Englander
Alfred A. Knopf, 339 pages, $25

In one of the most arresting stories in Nathan Englander’s first book, a collection called For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999), Charles Morton Luger discovers one afternoon in a taxi cab on Park Avenue that he is the bearer of a Jewish soul.

 “A New York story of the first order,” Mr. Englander writes, “like a woman giving birth in an elevator or a hot-dog vendor performing open-heart surgery with a pocketknife and Bic pen.”

In The Ministry of Special Cases, gone is the familiar contemporary cityscape and its inhabitants, though some of the characters introduced in Mr. Englander’s debut—the despondent Jewish acrobats whose farcical act keeps them alive; the revolutionary writers sentenced to death; the pious husband whose wife’s sexual rejection leads him astray—seem to have morphed into the family at the heart of the novel.

Set in Buenos Aires in 1976, at the outset of Argentina’s Dirty War, The Ministry of Special Cases is the story of Kaddish Poznan, the ambitious but cursed son of a prostitute; his loving wife, Lillian; and Pato, their headstrong son, a university student who reads banned books and whispers of conspiracy theories with his wayward friends.

To make a living, Lillian and Kaddish are forced to confront their own mortality on a daily basis. Outcast Kaddish is paid to chisel away from tombstones the names of prominent Jewish families’ embarrassing relatives (“I’ll tell you what this job is. It is work that needs to be done in a world that runs on shame,” he says), while Lillian works in a life-insurance sales office (“The only thing fire insurance has ever extinguished is a nagging doubt. The house goes up in flames just the same”), serving fattened generals and the like. Money is tight, but in the Poznan family, they love one another and fight one another with gusto. Their means may be meager, but their lives are not.At first, the regime’s oppression is only a distant menace, something Lillian believes a sturdy new door for their rented apartment will secure them from. But when Pato is suddenly arrested by the government, Lillian and Kaddish must descend into the quagmires of senseless bureaucracy—the Ministry of Special Cases—to appeal for their son’s release.

“I work hard!” one ministry official shouts impotently when Lillian and Kaddish come to him. “I’ve earned citations for hardness, for temerity!”

However, the real prize for temerity—if such prizes were awarded—would belong to Kaddish and Lillian, who, in their desperate attempts to find their son, are forced to plumb the depths of their marriage and their community; they are pushed to the edge of their sanity.

Grave-robbing, book-burning in the bathtub and multiple nose jobs (one of them botched) are just a few of the strange adventures of the Poznan family in this beautifully paced and engaging novel.

Nathan Englander bravely wrangles the themes of political liberty and personal loss with the swift style and knowing humor of folklore. In the spirit of the simple ambiguity of its title, The Ministry of Special Cases is carefully contradictory, wise and off-kilter, funny and sad.

Mythili Rao is a book reviewer for Publishers Weekly. She lives in New York.