Melville House Books

In an interview with Tina Brown for The Daily Beast, Philip Roth says the book is doomed to obscurity. Just as his latest novel is coming out — which they seem to be doing fast and furious these days — Roth says he previously thought the book had about 25 years left, but now he’s not so sure.

“I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it’s going to be cultic,” he says. “I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range.”

Other highlights of the interview:

“To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities.”

“The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen. Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.”

See the segment below (or the rest of the interview here) ….

Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.