The phrase late style entered general critical vocabulary through the posthumous Said book of 2006, and has since become the kind of formulation that does duty for whatever the critic wishes to argue. What Said meant, fairly precisely, was that certain artists in the closing phase of their careers produce work that resists the consolations of resolution — work that retains an intransigent, sometimes deliberately ungainly quality, and that refuses the rounded forms one expects of summary. The argument was advanced through Beethoven and Adorno more than through novelists, and there are good reasons to be cautious about transposing it across forms; but the framework has nevertheless been taken up enthusiastically in the criticism of fiction, and the late Roth novels are among its most-cited examples.
The question I want to put pressure on is whether Roth's final novels achieve late style in Said's sense or whether they perform it, and the difference, I think, matters more than the existing criticism has generally acknowledged. The two are not the same gesture. The first is a formal condition; the second is a stylistic effect that can be produced through craft and that an experienced novelist may very well produce when the cultural conversation expects it of him. To distinguish the one from the other we have to read the books slowly, and we have to be willing to ask whether the gestures of refusal are doing the work they appear to be doing or whether the appearance of refusal is itself the point.
What the late novels actually do
Take Everyman, the slim 2006 novella that announced the late phase formally. The book proceeds through a series of compressed scenes from the protagonist's life, organized loosely around the iterations of his medical decline, and ending — to use the word the criticism has settled on — at the grave. The prose is severely compressed; the sentences are shorter than Roth's middle-period sentences had typically been; the affect is one of pared-down lucidity, with very little of the comic and rhetorical excess that characterised the great late-middle books. The reader is meant to feel that the writer has stripped away everything but the necessary, and that what remains is the unaccommodated truth.
The trouble, when one reads the book closely, is that the stripped-down quality is itself a rhetorical effect, produced through quite specific stylistic choices and quite carefully managed pacing. The compression is not the abdication of style but a heightening of one mode of style — the late-Hemingway mode, more or less — that has been available to American novelists for a century. Everyman is not a book that has surrendered its formal ambitions; it is a book that has selected, with considerable care, a particular formal register, and that performs that register with considerable skill. The performance is admirable, but it is not, in Said's sense, an example of the unresolved.
The same problem attends the books that followed. Exit Ghost is, on the surface, a novel about loss of capacity — Zuckerman returning to New York older, diminished, no longer in possession of his powers — but the prose, when you look at it, is in full possession of its powers, and the structuring of the novel around the failed seduction and the spectral presence of Lonoff is in fact a more carefully managed formal pattern than most of what Roth had been doing in the previous decade. The book is about diminishment; it is not itself diminished. There is a difference, and it is not a small one.
The performance and the condition
Said's account of late style was, importantly, a description of work produced under conditions that exceeded the writer's control — illness, exhaustion, the failure of the powers that had previously been available. The unresolved quality of the late work was, in this account, not a stylistic choice but the trace of those failures showing through the surface of the work. What you saw on the page was what was left when the writer could no longer compose to the standard he had once been able to compose to. The interest of the late style, for Said, was that this reduced state produced something the earlier work could not have produced — an unaccommodation, a refusal of the false harmonies that mature mastery allows.
Roth's final phase, on this account, does not look like late style; it looks like the deliberate adoption of a style that resembles late style. The novels are short because the writer chose to make them short. The prose is compressed because the writer chose to compress it. The endings are abrupt and unconsoling because the writer chose to make them so. None of these are signs of capacities failing; they are signs of a writer in full command of his craft selecting, from the available stylistic options, the one that the cultural moment associates with the dying man's book.
This is not a criticism in the dismissive sense. The novels are, on their own terms, accomplished books, and Nemesis in particular is one of the more cleanly executed short novels of the 2010s, with a moral and historical seriousness that one cannot easily fault. The point is that the framework of late style as it has been applied to these books has been doing more work than it can carry, and has been allowing readers to experience the books in a particular way that is not what the books actually are. The books are mature performances. They are not the books of a writer whose powers had failed.
What this implies for how we read endings
The larger question, which the Roth case raises but does not on its own answer, is what we are doing when we read a late book through the framework of late style. The framework is a powerful interpretative engine — once activated, it shapes everything from the pacing of the reading to the emotional register one brings to the close. To call a book late is, among other things, to predispose the reader to find in it certain qualities that the framework expects, and to overlook other qualities that the framework does not have a place for.
The case of the late Roth suggests that we have been, in significant measure, finding in those books what the framework predisposed us to find, and that our reading of them has been less independent than it imagined itself to be. The novels are short and stark, and we read them as short and stark, but the more interesting question — what these books are doing on their own terms, what their formal choices accomplish, where they stand within the longer Roth career — has often been displaced by the satisfactions of the late-style narrative.
One could make the same argument, with adjustments, about the late McCarthy, the late DeLillo, the late Munro. In each case, the framework arrives in advance of the reading and shapes it. The framework is not wrong in any simple sense — there are real formal phenomena that justify the category — but it has become a default interpretative posture, and we have lost some of our willingness to ask whether the posture fits the book in front of us.
An ending without late style
What would it be to read these books without that posture? Not to ignore the biographical facts — that the writer was ill, that the writer was dying, that the books were the last of a long career — but to allow those facts to remain as facts about the conditions of production, rather than to convert them into a frame that determines in advance what the books mean. The biographical conditions of the late Roth novels are real. They are not, on their own, the literary content of the books.
The literary content is, if anything, more interesting when one declines the framework. Everyman read without the late-style frame is a stranger book than the standard reading suggests — a book that holds a long career's worth of stylistic registers in compressed form, that compresses them deliberately, and that arrives at a kind of ending that is more rhetorically managed and less unaccommodated than the framework wants it to be. Exit Ghost read without the frame is a book about reading — about the survival of literary attention into late life — and is more lucid about what reading does and doesn't do for the dying than the consolation-narrative reading allows.
The late books, read this way, are not failures and they are not the unaccommodated last words of a writer whose powers have failed. They are books by a writer in full command of his craft, choosing, with the care of a long-career professional, the formal registers that suit what he wants to say. That is its own kind of accomplishment. It does not need the inflated frame of late style to be what it is. And the inflation, when one considers what it has done to the broader reception of late careers in contemporary fiction, has probably cost us more than it has given us. We could read these books, and the late careers they belong to, with rather more interpretative independence than we have been doing. The books reward it.
