Waxing Roth.

• Author: Kimmage, Michael C.
• Position: Philip Roth: The Biography

Blake Bailey, Philip Roth: The Biography (New York: W.W Norton & Company, 2021) 921 pp., $40.00.

Philip Roth's novels, more often than not, mirror the world around them--Goodbye, Columbus the subtle radicalism of the Eisenhower era, Portnoy's Complaint the Age of Aquarius, and The Human Stain the moral-political tumult of the Clinton era. With the eerie precision of dystopian fiction, Roth even anticipated the Donald Trump presidency. His depiction of American democracy gone awry, The Plot Against America, preemptively outlined the perils of the Trump era.

In the twilight of his long career, Roth acquired the aura of a recluse. He owned a house in rural Connecticut. The solitude he cultivated there could be held responsible for his awesome productivity and for the image of a man who lived solely for the sake of his art. Some truth accrues to this image. A celebrated author at the age of twenty-six, and a notorious one by 1969, when he published Portnoy's Complaint, his succe's de scandale, Roth reserved his best writing for the second and less frenetic half of his life.

In the 1990s, he completed his enduring masterpieces: Patrimony, Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, and The Human Stain.

A recluse he may have been from time to time, but mostly Roth was in the fray. He had a genius for angering his readers--first for their impression of him as an anti-Semite or self-hating Jew, then for his path-breaking obscenity, and finally for their sense of him as a purveyor of misogyny in his fiction. This anger made Roth matter almost more than his actual fiction did: it enmeshed him in the culture. Roth was also in the fray of history. He witnessed Franklin Delano Roosevelt's casket pass through Newark en route to its final resting place in Hyde Park, New York. He had romantic encounters with Jackie Kennedy and Ava Gardner. He met and spoke with David Ben-Gurion. He rubbed elbows with Bobby Kennedy on Martha's Vineyard. He was given awards by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. This child of the 1930s lived to write some scathing sentences about Donald Trump. And those were merely his run-ins with high politics and high society.

More consequentially, Roth was a hub of twentieth-century literature. He was a disciple of Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, authors of Jewish background who paved the way for Roth to write about his childhood community and to see in Newark a place on par with James Joyce's Dublin or William Faulkner's Mississippi. Roth participated in public events with Ralph Ellison. He was an amicable rival of John Updike's, a companion to Don DeLillo and William Styron. He helped the Anglophone world to discover his Czech colleagues--Ivan Klima and Milan Kundera--not to menrion Romania's Norman Manea. Primo Levi could not decide whether he was a little brother or a big brother to Roth, who in turn was a mentor to Zadie Smith, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Lethem, and Nathan Englander. In the plenitude of his life, Roth occupies a singular spot in American literary history. Hemingway did more. Melville had greater adventures. Whitman lived through the Civil War in Washington, DC, capturing it in verse. Yet for longevity of experience and for the variety of his numerous novels, Roth stands alone.

The publication of Roth's first biography is thus something of an event. Blake Bailey's Philip Roth: The Biography runs to some eight hundred pages. It chronicles Roth's disastrous marriages; his seemingly innumerable affairs and liaisons; his finances and his dealings with publishers; his Newark childhood; his time in Chicago, Rome, London, New York, and at his studious idyll in Connecticut; his friendships and his ex-friendships; his dedication to teaching literature; his bouts of depression and incandescent humor; his back pain and heart disease; and, behind his busy public and private life, the evolution of his writing from the late 1950s to his "retirement" from literature in 2014. Prodigiously researched and well written, Bailey's book captures the spirit of its subject. It is lively and often very funny. We are lucky to have it.

Bailey's assiduous biography fills in the blanks of Philip Roth's life, which is interesting enough. This biography also doubles as a cultural history, extending from World War II-era patriotism to the shock of Trump's presidency--the digital twenty-first century, in which Roth feared the death of the mindset that has the patience, the slowness, and the care to appreciate novels. Bailey's work will bring new readers to Roth, who should discover much to treasure in his literature. Through it, the two questions that have been roiling American politics in recent years can be scrutinized...