An impressive, complex biography of the celebrated American writer, packed with anecdotes and jokes, inevitably details his shocking attitude towards women
“I don’t want you to rehabilitate me,” Philip Roth instructed Blake Bailey. “Just make me interesting.” The headline story can’t fail to be interesting: lower-middle-class grandson of immigrants writes scandalous bestseller about masturbation, is vilified as a self-hating Jew, has two disastrous marriages and many lovers, accumulates a stupendously diverse body of work (comic, surreal, metafictional, naturalistic), comes to be seen as the greatest English-language novelist of his day yet never, to his chagrin, wins the Nobel. But Roth wanted nuances not headlines, suggesting that Bailey call his biography “The Terrible Ambiguity of the ‘I’”. Luckily, that isn’t the title. But ambiguity is central to the story, particularly in relation to Roth’s treatment of women, in life and in fiction, which is where the issue of rehabilitation arises and, as with his peers (Saul Bellow, John Updike and Norman Mailer), can’t really be avoided, least of all now.
“Always it came back to the women,” Bailey writes, the first of them Roth’s mother Bess, who, if not as suffocating as Alex Portnoy’s mother, was so adoring that no subsequent woman in his life could match up. While sharing Bess’s devotion to Philip and his brother Sandy, her husband Herman left a mark in other ways, not least through his work ethic (12-hour days, six days a week). “He who is loved by his parents is a conquistador,” Roth liked to say. Despite the antisemitism of the period, he remembered his childhood as a haven. Newark to him was like Dublin to Joyce: a place he escaped but never left.
