Different story, same difference

They don8217;t have much else in common, but Philip Roth, John Updike and Toni Morrison do resemble one another in at least one respect: their ages. Roth is 75 this year, Updike is 76, and Morrison is 77. Together these three are the ranking triumvirate of a literary generation8230; that dominated American fiction for the second half of the 20th century. This year all three have arrived at an extraordinary moment of reflection. Roth, Updike and Morrison have new novels out this fall, and in each of them they return to a story they first told much earlier in their careers. In The Widows of Eastwick Updike has dreamed up a sequel to his novel of suburban sorcery, The Witches of Eastwick. In Indignation Roth retells the story of Portnoy8217;s Complaint, the brilliant, pneumatically obscene book that made him famous. And in A Mercy, due out in November, Morrison 8212; the last American writer to win a Nobel8230; tells the story of a mother who loses her daughter to slavery, just as she did in Beloved.

There8217;s nothing unusual about writers recycling material. They8217;re a larcenous bunch8230; But when a writer steals from him- or herself, something quite different is going on. This kind of revisiting is a way for older writers to make contact with their younger selves across the abyss of time 8212; to engage themselves in conversation, to argue over what they missed and what they got wrong and, above all, to register the ways that time has altered their understanding of the world8230; By going over old ground, these old masters8230; are annexing new territory.

From an article by Lev Grossman in 8216;Time8217;