Philip Roth the Biography

b y B l a k e B a i l e y

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

Every new literary sensation that I read inevitably fails when compared with Roth’s subtlety and intelligence. He was frequently accused of being a Jew-hating Jew, especially after the success of Portnoy’s Complaint. If anything the opposite is true. Virtually all his fiction is imbued with our religion and could never have been written by a gentile. He certainly loathed the observance of Judaism but he did not hate Jews. Most of his friends and colleagues were Jews. One wife was Jewish. His and our failure is that Roth is so easy to misunderstand. Roth’s words ooze his religion and his upbringing with his very Jewish family. With the possible exception of “The Human Stain”, all his books are about Jews and Judaism. If a Roth novel was a food item you would say it had been marinaded far too long in Jewish angst. Not like Woody Allen. Indeed the opposite. Roth can be very funny but he never sets out just to make us laugh. He wants the reader to think.

Bailey was his second chosen biographer and has done a magnificent job in keeping his volume to 800 pages. For this was an extraordinary life, chock full of mistakes and failures, misjudgements and calamities. Not helped by Roth’s love of so very many women. Indeed in his life he was repeatedly accused of hating women. This was never so. If anything he patently loved them far too much. Before I bought the book I admitted to myself some trepidation at both the length of the volume and the prospect of some prolonged dense literary criticism. In reality neither was a problem. Instead, where the book falls down is with Bailey’s inability to get to the real heart of the failures of Roth’s two marriages. The first to a non-Jew called Maggie was bound to fail, because the woman grossly tricked Roth into matrimony. The second, to the British actress Clare Bloom, should have stood a better chance, but ended in huge and public acrimony, to the discredit of both parties. Bailey hints at but fails to get into the true causes of the two failures. In fact, to learn all you need to know on both wedded bliss and torment, you just need to read Roth himself. His fiction tells the story of his life better than any biographer could, however brilliant.

Page 23