Five More Sentences, Plus One

[Warning: contains profanity.]

Postscript to Friday: For those of you who wonder—and there are always some of us—I collected the first lines of Philip Roth’s five subsequent novels. Perhaps one day, Roth will also claim a mysterious origin to these sentences:

Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over. [20]   The Swede. [21]   Ira Ringold's older brother, Murray, was my first high school English teacher, and it was through him that I hooked up with Ira. [22]   It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk—who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty—confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college. [23]   I knew her eight years ago. [24]

      20. Sabbath’s Theater
      21. American Pastoral
      22. I Married a Communist
      23. The Human Stain
      24. The Dying Animal

It's pretty hard to keep up with a writer as prolific as Philip Roth. His twenty-fifth book, a novel that imagines what the world may have been like had an anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh defeated FDR in the 1940 presidential election, was released in the past few days (and at the time of this posting ranked #2 on Amazon's sales list). It begins:

  Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. [25]

      25. The Plot Against America

I find myself repeatedly mulling over Roth's so-called "myth of origin" [Professor Shostak] regarding the first sentences of his first nineteen books...as well as my ready gullibility at the suggestion.

It is an intriguing scenario to imagine. What if Philip Roth's creative output had been driven by such a serendipitous act? And how different would the world of literature be if Roth had found a piece of paper containing the first nineteen sentences of what is now John Updike’s body of work or Saul Bellow's? Or what if instead of Roth, Thomas Pynchon or Chaim Potok had found that sheet of paper and had a compulsion similar to the one described by Philip Roth?

Hmmm. That gives me two really great ideas.