A humorous Onion-style story on the International Herald Tribune‘s website asks an obvious question: how is it that, at 72, an age at which many writers have already slowed down, Pulitzer Prize-winner novelist Philip Roth can remain so prolific? Less than a week after baseball player Rafael Palmeiro avoided performance-enhancing drug-related perjury charges, the farcical answer, according to critic Peter Mehlman, is illicit drug use.

Mehlman’s use of direct quotes alone make the story worth reading. First, he reports on “one writer, who requested anonymity to avoid seeming cranky, [who] whispered, ‘Since I came out with Bonfire of the Vanities, I’ve written two novels. Roth has churned out, what, 12? Do the math.'” The second quote comes after Mehlman’s account of the syntactical acrobatics that allowed Roth, at the age of 64, to write a page-long grammatically correct sentence starting with the words “Only after strudel and coffee….” Here Mehlman quotes James Joyce, who said, “By the age of 45, I knew I could no longer start a sentence with a mention of strudel. My fingers would want to do it, but my mind just wouldn’t react.” His third amusing quote? “‘Writing is hard,’ said one famously blocked author, who requested anonymity in order to keep her publisher from believing she died 12 years ago. ‘You look for any edge you can get.'” Apparently.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from the International Herald Tribune