BOOKPATHS

Newark, New Jersey, U.S.

Philip Roth joined participants on the October 17th “Philip Roth’s Newark” bus tour.

Philip Roth came home again Saturday, which is not so unusual because he’s been a frequent visitor in recent years. 'As you get older, you get closer to home.' Roth said this as he entered the Newark Museum yesterday as the surprise guest on a bus tour of Newark. Now 76, the man once called one of America’s greatest authors is now called America’s greatest living author as contemporaries like Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and John Updike have passed on in recent years. – from “A Tour of Philip Roth’s Newark Includes Surprise Visit By the Author,” by Mark DiIonno, The Star-Ledger

The Pine Barrens, New Jersey, U.S.

The Pine Barrens, by John McPhee (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988; first published 1968)

John McPhee transports readers to New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, a forest of pine, oak, and cedar, surrounded by development.  McPhee shares the history of place and residents, including the “Pineys,” the “few people who dwell in the region,” while also describing the sights, sounds, and scents of this peaceful forest, a refuge from the urban centers.  One leaves the book’s pages hoping that this at risk area will continue to thrive amidst development and suburbanization.

In parts of northern New Jersey, there are as many as forty thousand people per square mile.  In the central area of the Pine Barrens – the forest land that is still so undeveloped that it can be called wilderness – there are only fifteen people per square mile.  This area, which includes about six hundred and fifty thousand acres, is nearly as large as Yosemite National Park.  It is almost identical in size with Grand Canyon National Park, and it is much larger than Sequoia National Park, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, or, for that matter, most of the national parks in the United States. – from The Pine Barrens, by John McPhee

Related Websites

Publisher’s Website

John McPhee’s Website

New Jersey Pinelands Commission

Pinelands National Reserve

Pinelands Preservation Alliance

Montclair, New Jersey

The American Booksellers Association profiles Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, New Jersey.

“Watchung Booksellers, which opened in 1991 and was bought by Margot Sage-EL in 1996, is in Montclair, New Jersey, 12 miles from downtown Manhattan. This scenic town of 38,000, located on Orange Mountain in the Watchung Mountain range, is home to several bookshelves featuring local notable authors and celebrities from all fields.” – from ABA Website

New Jersey Shore

Charles McGrath talks with Richard Ford about the setting for his new Frank Bascombe novel, The Lay of the Land.

“Mr. Ford, who was born and reared in Mississippi, discovered the Jersey Shore in the late 1970’s, when he and his wife were living in Princeton, where he had a teaching job. After years of being ‘university mice,’ he said, they felt newly liberated, but they were also house-poor, and so for recreation on the weekends they hopped into the car and just drove around. The shore quickly became one of their favorite destinations, and even after they moved away, he continued to feel what he now calls a ‘tidal pull’ in that direction.” – from “A New Jersey State of Mind,” by Charles McGrath, New York Times

Clinton, New Jersey

The American Booksellers Association profiles Clinton Book Shop in Clinton, New Jersey, this week.

“Clinton Book Shop, a 2,300-square-foot store located on Main Street in the Victorian-era town of Clinton, New Jersey, proudly proclaims its community roots. Harvey Finkel, the store's owner for the past three years, reminds customers of the bookstore's more than quarter-century of service to the community by adding a tagline to all correspondence: "Thank you for your patronage of the Clinton Book Shop, your locally owned and operated independent choice for reading for over 28 years." – from ABA Website

Clinton Book Shop Website

Newark, New Jersey

“What’s history? History is everything that happens everywhere, even here in Newark, even here on Summit Avenue, even what happens in this house to an ordinary man.” – from The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth

The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth (Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004)

The Weequahic neighborhood had been built on farm lots at the undeveloped southwest edge of Newark just after World War One, some half dozen of the streets named, imperially, for victorious naval commanders in the Spanish-American War and the local movie house called, after FDR’s fifth cousin – and the country’s twenty-sixth president – the Roosevelt. Our street, Summit Avenue, sat at the crest of the neighborhood hill, an elevation as high as any in a port city that rarely rises a hundred feet above the level of the tidal salt marsh to the city’s north and east and the deep bay due east of the airport that bends around the oil tanks of the Bayonne peninsula and merges there with New York Bay to flow past the Statue of Liberty and into the Atlantic. – from The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth

Philip Roth masterfully imagines a Charles Lindbergh presidency in The Plot Against America, but its setting emerges from the real landscape of his childhood. Entering the novel, you enter 1940s Newark, particularly the Jewish neighborhood where Roth grew up. As the characters walk the city streets, go to school and work, run errands, ride the bus, or pass an afternoon in Weequahic Park, they act as guides to time and place.

Much has changed since the 1940s. The Weequahic neighborhood is no longer Jewish. Street Names may be familiar and a few places remain, such as Weequahic Park and South Mountain Reservation, but many of the book’s landmarks have disappeared or changed beyond recognition. In a 2004 New York Times article, “Walking the Streets of a Writer’s Memory,” David Carr concluded that “the Newark of Mr. Roth’s books is nothing more than a memory held in common by people who once lived there.” Still, I can’t help but think that by entering the Newark of Roth’s memory in The Plot Against America, we see today’s Newark with a sense of geographical history we wouldn’t otherwise own.

The men had not only worked for years in the same district office but met to play pinochle on the two evenings a month the women had their mahjong game, and from time to time, on a Sunday morning, a group of them went off to the old sweatbaths on Mercer Street with their young sons in tow – the offspring of this set happened to be boys somewhere between Sandy’s age and mine. On Decoration Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day the families would usually organize a picnic some ten miles west of our neighborhood at the bucolic South Mountain Reservation, where the fathers and the sons tossed horseshoes and chose up sides for softball and listened to a ball game on somebody’s static-ridden portable radio, the most magical technology known to our world. -- from The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth