Philip Roth the Biography by Blake Bailey Reviewed by Julian Landy This is a huge book. Over 800 pages, followed by nearly a hundred pages of acknowledgements, notes, sources, and an index. Unless you are a Roth fanatic, I suggest you dip in and out at leisure. The book itself has been both highly anticipated and very controversial. A few weeks after publication several American women suggested that they had been sexually assaulted by the writer, Blake Bailey. Without any investigation or trial, the reactionary USA publisher withdrew the book from shops and shredded all copies. You can, thankfully, still buy it in UK. As a biography it works on all levels. It is both thorough and thoughtful about Roth’s work and his life. And what a life. Certainly the greatest novelist since Tolstoy not to get a gong from the Nobel panel. What an atrocious omission! Was Roth just too Jewish for the cold Swedes? Their shame. Roth is arguably the greatest writer in any form, of the last sixty years. The artist against whom other novelists must measure themselves. Page 22
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