If this all seems especially modern, it worth remembering that the institution of retirement itself is a modern development. Mary-Lou Weisman put it plainly in the Times back in 1999:

In the beginning, there was no retirement. There were no old people. In the Stone Age, everyone was fully employed until age 20, by which time nearly everyone was dead, usually of unnatural causes.

Weisman goes on: retirement emerged from the pension system enacted in Germany in the late nineteenth century, and didn’t take full American form until the thirties, when the country needed to find a way to make room for younger workers by encouraging older ones to stop. Could there be a similar social utility in writers formally retiring? Old people like retirement because they get to stop working and still enjoy some measure of financial protection, whether from the state or from their own previous contributions. Young people like retirement because it gets the old people out of jobs, and out of the way. Maybe there are too many writers—or not enough readers to go around—but compulsory retirement won’t help all the young scribblers much. People are still buying “Paradise Lost,” after all, despite Milton’s being safely retired long ago in the Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate.

Convincing older writers to hang it up might not save the publishing industry, but Roth’s retirement may, regardless, mark the beginning of a trend. What might the future of literary retirements look like? Maybe writers will retire on Twitter—#goinggentleintothatgoodnight. The subtle ones could simply slip the news in the acknowledgements section of their final books. Or, picture this: a novelist, flanked by her agent, editor, and spouse, sitting at a microphone, thanking her devoted fans for all their support. “It got tough there for a while, when I wrote that zombie novel, but thanks for sticking with me.” Tearing up a bit while thanking that first English teacher who believed in her.

This is not an entirely facetious image: the most obvious cases of public retirements are those of professional athletes, for whom earning potential and social utility peaks especially early in a career, and then quickly and mostly permanently falls off a cliff. No one especially cares, nor is willing to spend money to find out, what a fifty-year-old pitcher’s fastball looks like—because we already know the answer: slower. The various rites of passage from rookie year to the last press conference form, by now, a well-marked path. And yet some athletes manage to botch the staging, announcing their retirements, receiving the attention and feting as is customary to their talents, but then, rather than sauntering off to the golf course or the executive ranks or to some bank vault to swim in their money, they hang about, attempting comebacks and making fools out of the public and themselves. By the time these malingerers finally hang up the sneakers, the public has grown tired of honoring their careers and simply wish the old guys gone.

Writers are a different bunch—for all kinds of obvious reasons. They have fewer fans. They earn less money—football players are not known to wrestle over tenured creative-writing professorships. And most essentially to this discussion, their value to the public is not necessarily diminished by age; in many cases, it is, in fact, enhanced, not simply because there is for many writers a real possibility that their talents will improve with years of practice, but also because readers want to interact with the literary consciousness of writers at ninety as much as we do with writers at twenty. (James Salter, whom Nick Paumgarten writes about this week in the magazine, has a new novel out—his first in thirty years. It’s great. He turns eighty-eight in June.)

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.

Roth, meanwhile, is retiring the way that Americans of a certain age are expected to retire—a bit past sixty-five, but in the same spirit. Last year, he explained his decision to Charles McGrath, of the Times. There were two explanations: the existential and the merely prosaic. The existential reason for calling it quits was summed up by a Post-it note that Roth kept stuck on his computer: “The struggle with writing is over.” That’s the chilling and powerful one, but the prosaic explanation has merit, too. Roth told McGrath:

My house this summer was full of people…. I had guests practically every weekend, and sometimes they stayed through the week. I have a cook now who cooks for me. In the old days I couldn’t have people in the house all the time. When they came for the weekend, I couldn’t get out to write.

Jealous or romantic readers, craving more, might scoff: “Roth retires … to entertain?” But why shouldn’t he? What is it about the profession of writer that denies its practitioners their share of the great twentieth-century American dream? It may be hard to imagine what the author of all those great books—a man, as David Remnick wrote, for whom writing was a “fanatical habit”—will do with himself. Shuffleboard seems unlikely. But that’s his business—surely he has done his bit for our collective company of American readers. This spring, he turned eighty and got his gold watch. And it makes sense that such an essential chronicler of American middle-class experience in the twentieth century would be the first American novelist to be treated to the trappings, minor as they are, of a public American retirement.

Then again, maybe the filmmaker Livia Manera is right, and Roth will just keep on writing, with more novels coming in his lifetime or after it. Roth told McGrath that he didn’t want to be like Frank Sinatra, and make a big thing of retiring only to come back. Sinatra is a more dignified example, though Roth might have mentioned Brett Favre—or all those other sad and lost sporting souls who can’t keep well enough away. We may not have wanted Roth to call it quits, but now that he has, for the sake of historical and narrative tidiness, we may hope that he keeps his word.

Illustration by Joost Swarte