Ian Crouch wonders:
Critical opinion is not a statistics-based endeavor, and so we don’t have a graphical curve that tells us when a writer is likely to produce his or her best work. Some writers never match their first novels (Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller). Others reach their peaks in some middle-career moment, when they have fully developed voices and still retain vigor and health and time to put toward the task. (Roth seems to fit this category, although favorites might be found at the beginning and the end).
Yet there are examples of great writers writing splendidly right until the finish—and even the diminished output of older writers is valuable, if only because it matters how great writers absorb and accept and reject the pains and insights of age. Roth has mentioned that he didn’t want to add mediocre books to the world’s library—and there are many, many examples of great writers perpetrating all kinds of lesser crimes in their advanced age. It seems likely that a novel by, say, Hemingway at seventy would have been among his worst, charting the decline of his output. But who wouldn’t want to read what worlds Hemingway might have made out of being seventy? A quote attributed to him goes like this: “Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.” It seems safe to say that dying is uglier.
The Dish 