Anyone who has read Portnoy’s Complaint might raise an eyebrow at the idea of “pulling a Roth,” but Stuart Evers, writing on the Guardian‘s book blog, means something altogether different. Evers notes that unlike many novelists whose talent wanes as they age, Roth has flourished in his late career:

The sequence of novels that began with Sabbath’s Theatre in 1995 and ended with 2000’s The Human Stain are books of howling rage and bitter elegy “ genuine works of art. But they were not without precedent, even when Roth’s career was commercially and critically in dire straits. The Counterlife in 1987, for example, may well be his best book. What critics feasted on was that most hateful of modern expressions, his “journey”: the bad boy of letters, now realising his potential and becoming the greatest living American novelist. The second coming of Roth was as much predicated on the literary community’s surprise that he had bucked the established writerly trajectory “ an early establishing period, a peak in middle age, terminal decline “ as it was on the undoubted quality of his work.

Evers goes on to muse about other established writers who might … erm … pull a Roth:

Over drinks to celebrate the launch of The London Word festival, some friends and I bandied around names of the authors most likely to deliver something that eclipsed their earlier work “ or at least arrested its decline. Martin Amis was the immediate answer, though those who had read the new book were less convinced. Ian McEwan was mentioned more in hope than expectation, while a suggestion of Irvine Welsh just skewed the debate to whether Trainspotting was actually any good in the first place.

He finally settles on Will Self and Hanif Kureishi as two U.K. writers who might reasonably pull a Roth, which prompts Quillblog to wonder, might there be any Canadian candidates? Atwood, Munro, and Gallant “ Roth’s Canadian near-contemporaries “ have never really experienced a sustained decline in readership or critical accolades, so perhaps in this country there’s no need for our writers to pull a Roth. So to speak.