Philip the second
Just as one big biography of Philip Roth appears, another follows in its wake
This is the second biography of Philip Roth to appear this year. Blake Bailey’s was a beast, over 900 pages. Nadel’s is 560 pages. Both biographies are well researched and clearly written and both focus on Roth’s parents and his two disastrous marriages. Neither can really account for why Roth, born into a stable Jewish family, should have been drawn to two such difficult women with predictable consequences.
The biggest difference between Bailey and Nadel lies in the way they slice the cake, especially when it comes to literature. There is far more in Nadel about the writers Roth admired: the modern masters, from Flaubert and Henry James to Chekhov to Dostoyevsky; and the great post-war American novelists, especially Bellow and Malamud, Styron and Updike, three friends and a rival (Updike). Nadel is particularly good on the impact of central European Jewish writers on Roth – Bruno Schulz, Primo Levi and Norman Manea and, above all, Kafka – and how they changed the way Roth thought about what kind of Jew he was.
But Nadel is at his best on the Jewish neighbourhood in Newark where Roth grew up and on Roth’s late writing, what he calls “The Jersey Style”, those last spare, dark novels. Like Bailey, Nadel writes too much about Portnoy’s Complaint and
Nadel is good on the late, dark novels written in the ‘Jersey Style’
Goodbye, Columbus. Of course, these are Roth’s breakthrough works and Portnoy not only made Roth famous, it made him rich. But his really powerful books were the five novels at the turn of the century: Sabbath’s Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), The Human Stain (2000) and The Plot Against America (2004).
If Roth had fallen under a bus on his 60th birthday he would not be regarded as America’s greatest postwar writer, better even than Bellow. He would have been remembered as a good but not great writer, obsessed with sex, Jews and Newark in that order, who played around with autobiography and fiction in a way that delighted academics and annoyed general readers. It is easily forgotten how many of Roth’s novels in the 1970s and ’80s didn’t sell or receive critical acclaim.
But then he produced that extraordinary sequence of novels, five in nine years, which took on the great American stories: antisemitism in the 1930s, McCarthyism, Vietnam and the 1960s, race, Clinton and, above all, “the American berserk”.
Why, at that point, did America become his great subject? Why did Roth understand the irrationalism and violence of modern American life better than any other writer before or since? These are the questions any biographer should ask but Nadel fails to do so, despite all his research.
Nadel has had a rough ride from the critics. Most have preferred Bailey’s authorised biography. But this sells Nadel short; his book is full of insights and the two biographies are best read together.