Tag Archives: Philip Roth

An Ideal Mother

By Robin Bates | Published: January 9, 2014

When I think of a mother-son relationship that most matches my own, I think of Betsy Trotwood and David Copperfield.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O'Connor, mothers and sons, Oedipus, Parenting, Portnoy's Complaint, Sophocles, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf | Comments closed

Vague Identity Adjectives Killed Trayvon

By Robin Bates | Published: July 16, 2013

Novelist Susan Bender says that a literary understanding would have prevented the Trayvon Martin killing.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged George Zimmerman, Goodbye Columbus, Invisible Man, racial profiling, Ralph Ellison, Trayvon Martin | Comments closed

Returning Home to Aging Parents

By Robin Bates | Published: May 21, 2013

Marilynne’s Robinson’s novel “Home” captures some of my own experience returning home.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Aging, Great American Dream, Home: A Novel, homecoming, Marilynne Robinson, parents | Comments closed

Great Political Novels Not Agenda Driven

By Robin Bates | Published: September 27, 2012

Great political novels are rich in spiritual attitude. Poor ones are agenda driven.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Easter 1916", American Pastoral, Berger's Daughter, fathers and sons, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, Joseph Conrad, Literary Theory, Nadine Gordimer, Natalia Ginzburg, Orhan Pamuk, political novel, snow, Stendahl, V.S. Naipaul, Vargas Llosa, William Butler Yeats | Comments closed

Absolutely Nothing Beats a Triple

By Robin Bates | Published: August 7, 2010

Sports Saturday Last Sunday was a very good day for Colorado Rockies player Carlos Gonzalez. He hit for the cycle (a single, a double, a triple and a home run), a feat that has occurred only 291 times in the history of baseball. Furthermore, the home run was of the walk-off variety, occurring in the […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Baseball, Great American Novel, Sports | Comments closed

The Perfect Game that Wasn’t

By Robin Bates | Published: June 12, 2010

Armando Galarraga Sports Saturday Even as we stand on the precipice of the World Cup—tragically I will be traveling cross country today when the U.S. is playing England—something has been happening in the world of baseball that invites comment. Perfect games are breaking out all over. A pitcher pitches a perfect game if no runner […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Luxury Boxes", Baseball, Bruce Cohen, Great American Novel, Perfection, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sports | Comments closed

Uncomfortable Books that Help Us Grow

By Robin Bates | Published: April 22, 2010

Streep and Kline in Sophie’s Choice A recent survey of the Tea Party movement has revealed that the movement is overwhelmingly white, educated, middle class and conservative, and people are now studying what it all means. I love this post Ta-Tehisi Coates, a senior editor for The Atlantic. As occurs in the world of the […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Aruhdhati Roy, Diversity, Emily Bronte, God of Small Things, Human Stain, Native Son, politics, racism, Richard Wright, Sophie's Choice, Tea Party, William Styron, Wuthering Heights | Comments closed

Shadow Projections on the President

By Robin Bates | Published: September 18, 2009

A couple of months ago I wondered on this blog whether some of the vitriolic attacks on Obama (as distinguished from reasoned disagreement) were driven by racism, and now I see that others are wondering the same, including Maureen Dowd and Jimmy Carter. But a reader of Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish has a more […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Absolon Absolon, All the King's Men, Andrew Sullivan, Barack Obama, Beloved, Daily Dish, Flannery O'Connor, Gloria Naylor, Human Stain, Joseph Conrad, Linden Hills, right-wing anger, Robert Penn Warren, Secret Sharer, Sophie's Choice, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, William Styron, Wise Blood | Comments closed

Is Father-Son Conflict Inevitable?

By Robin Bates | Published: July 22, 2009

I had an interesting conversation with my two sons yesterday as we drove them and my daughter-in-law to the Portland airport, marking the beginning of the end of our summer vacation. The conversation began with me wondering why there weren’t works of literature that accurately capture the kind of father-son relationship that I feel that […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Daniel Defoe, David Copperfield, fathers and sons, Great Expectations, Hamlet, Henry IV, Homer, Human Stain, Lawrence Sterne, Nicholas Nickleby, Odyssey, Oedipus, Oliver Twist, Road, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare, Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison, Tristram Shandy | Comments closed