Roger Rosenblatt Discusses Lapham Rising

Satirist Finds Receptive
Audience in Smithtown

Roger Rosenblatt Discusses His Best-Seller Lapham Rising

By Nancy A. Bock

April 27, 2007 - Smithtown, NY

"Once I started in the world of fiction, to wake up every morning and know I can invent the world," was how Roger Rosenblatt described the joy he finds in writing novels. Guests at the Smithtown Library Foundation luncheon last week laughed continuously; from the introduction, through the reading of a chapter of Rosenblatt's most recent literary success, the best selling novel Lapham Rising, and the question and answer session that followed.

"Wicked good fun" is how Foundation Board President Jim Teese described the book adding that it was so funny it was "impossible to put down". Among those in attendance at the very successful event were Foundation Board members June Carlson (also a Library Trustee) and Jane Conway as well as Library Board president Anthony Monteleone, Councilwomen Joanne Gray and Pat Biancaniello.

Rosenblatt, who most recently joined the faculty of Stony Brook's Graduate English Department uses his personal experiences and vivid wit to spin stories with characters both funny and believable featuring Long Island's East End as the setting. The local flavor, tinged with stereotypical images of South Fork life brought the novel even closer to home for the Smithtown audience.

Having added fiction novelist to his already varied career as a journalist, playwright, essayist and educator, Rosenblatt said each medium had its own strengths. Although he has published three collections of essays, those he created for TV's "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" were never included in a book. Those essays, which won him an Emmy as well as a George Foster Peabody Award, were written for the medium of television and did not have the same effect when read cold, in print, he explained.

But he has mastered the skill of putting words to paper and creating a story. In fiction he can have a character, such as Harry, the "hero" of Lapham Rising interact with people who are compilations of other people he has met or someone he totally created. The idea of "creating one's own universe" as he put it, is something he relishes. It was no surprise when he proclaimed that Harry is a fictionalized version of himself.

Rosenblatt’s second novel is due out in January and the third is already in the works. "It is about a man whose mistress cheats on him," Rosenblatt offered about the one he is just beginning. "And he vows vengeance," he teased. A necessary part of the challenge is to make the "hero" likable or sympathetic. One of Rosenblatt's greatest tools in achieving this goal is satire, another is his mastery of turning simple phrases into images that are not only believable but funny, biting and a bit poetic.

Rosenblatt is able to write in so many forms because he understands their differences. The strength of an essay is digression," he explained. "You can only go so far off the central theme. The author counts on digression to strengthen the core argument." The writers he most greatly admires, he said, are poets. "They yoke together feelings with cleverness," he noted.

"I always wanted to write creatively, but lacked the nerve," he said. "So, after teaching, I went into writing essays and that was a segue for journalism." Indeed his career has been marked with accomplishments in all of those fields, as well as nonfiction, and now fiction. His book, Children of War, about children around the world growing up on battlegrounds in modern times was awarded the 1983 Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. A Fullbright Scholar and Harvard graduate, he counts two George Polk Awards, the George Foster Peabody Award, an Emmy as well as awards from the Overseas Press Club and American Bar Association, among his accolades.

Before signing copies of Lapham Rising for guests after the luncheon, Rosenblatt reminisced a bit. "I remember, when I was a kid, with my father, who had a friend, Blake Donaldson, and we used to go fishing in Smithtown." This small and bygone tie between the author and audience made the event even more special for those who attended.

The Smithtown Library Foundation sponsors the annual book and author luncheons to raise funds to support major projects for the Smithtown Library system. It is an independent organization that holds several events each year. Information about future events can be found on the Smithtown Library’s website www.smithlib.org .