In 2012, Philip Roth announced that he would stop writing. “I am 78 years old, I don’t know anything anymore about America today,” he told a French interviewer. “I don’t think a new book will change what I’ve already done, and if I write a new book it will probably be a failure. Who needs to read one more mediocre book?”
That's pretty brave for a writer with a vast audience and an enviable track record of commercial and critical success. And it's smart. A few months ago, some friends and I were trying to explain Gay Talese's spectacular public meltdown, when a number of "facts" in his book "The Voyeur's Motel" proved to be fiction. "Fellas," I explained, "the guy is 84 years old."
It's impolite to say it, but Philip Roth and David Ortiz have something in common: They know when to quit. Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and John le Carré, not really. All three of these superb 20-century talents have recently blotted their 21st-century copybooks with odd, mediocre work not at all representative of their talent.
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Really, what does Tom Wolfe know about evolution and generative linguistics? Not a whole heck of a lot, if one reads the attacks directed against his recently published "The Kingdom of Speech." In the book, Wolfe argues that Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky got it all wrong, that language is not an evolutionary trait.
Mau-mauing the graybeards is Wolfe's stock-in-trade. In two of his books, "The Painted Word" and "From Bauhaus to Our House," he eviscerated modish art criticism and modernist architecture, but at least he had a passing acquaintance with each. Not so in "Speech," according to a withering Washington Post takedown by University of Chicago professor emeritus of ecology and evolution Jerry Coyne. "White suit unsullied by any real research," Coyne writes, and doesn't let up.
"Somewhere on his mission to tear down the famous, elevate the neglected outsider, and hit the exclamation-point key as often as possible," Coyne continues, "Wolfe has forgotten how to think." Ouch.
John le Carré is Wolfe's age, and has just delivered a memoir, "The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life," that is much less than his army of fans would have hoped for. It isn't really a memoir so much as a mare's nest of anecdotes, in no apparent chronological order and with no apparent unifying theme. I love gossip, and there is some fine tattle about Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Sydney Pollack, and other Hollywood types.
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Le Carré masticates his lifelong obsessions with the British traitor Kim Philby, and with his own father, a criminal, con man, and traitor in his own right. But Fritz Erler? Bernard Pivot? Who are these people, each featured in his own mini-chapter? "Though the name won't ring many bells these days," le Carré likewise holds forth about a once-notable British politician named Quintin Hogg.
Writing in The New York Times, Walter Isaacson said of "Pigeon Tunnel": "The result is not so much a memoir as a collection of memories, many of them containing tantalizing intimations of a powerful autobiography that still yearns to be written." I fear that powerful autobiography will never appear.
Look, I've got nothing against 80-year-olds. I'm 20 minutes away from being 80 myself. But just as great surgeons need to know when to put down the scalpel, and great sluggers need to know when to put down the bat, writers, too, need to keep an ear cocked to the quiet signal that we all have to hear: It's Time.
Alex Beam's column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @imalexbeamyrnot.