Of new houses and old men

They say it’s a natural part of becoming an adult, when you start to realize — gradually — that the house where you grew up isn’t where you live anymore. You begin to understand that the phrase “childhood home” actually means the place where people tried their best to prepare you for your own life.

Some children take it gracefully. Others, like Jonathan Franzen, write thinly veiled autobiographical novels excoriating their parents.

“Do me a favor,” I pleaded, “don’t read ‘The Corrections’ until you give the new house a chance.”

--Michelle Slatalla has a little fun at Mr. Franzen's expense as she breaks it to her college-age daughters that they're moving to a new house. I'll say this, my parents still live in my childhood home and I'm pretty attached to the place. They just became empty nesters, so this topic is definitely in the air, but if their moving caused me to write something a tenth as good as THE CORRECTIONS... it might be worth it. Good thing they don't read here, or else they could be packing by the end of this sentence.

Unfortunately this is only my second-favorite literary scene from this weekend's New York Times, prize going to this sentence from a Katie Roiphe essay:

After reading a sex scene in Philip Roth’s latest novel, “The Humbling,” someone I know threw the book into the trash on a subway platform.

Sorry, she did what? I haven't read THE HUMBLING yet. I don't know whether it's good. Some Roth I liked and some I didn't. But we do not throw away books. At least you could donate it! Or pass it off to a BHD on a Brooklyn-bound train. Or sell it at the Strand and buy something less personally offensive.

There are jaw-droppers aplenty in the rest of the essay, which is about sex and the male American novelist then and now, but I never got over that anecdote. If she can afford to throw away a hardcover why is she taking the subway in the first place? She could take a cab... or perhaps a magical money-eating winged chariot. I hope Roiphe had to provide the name of this "someone [she] know[s]" for a fact-checker who called her up and said, "Did you, Janeane Q. Public, really throw a Philip Roth book away on a subway platform? Really?" And then that fact-checker hung up, slammed his forehead down on his desk several times, and went back to trying to verify that Antonin Scalia is shocked that not everyone likes him.