Philip Roth biography spends time on scandal instead of art
The iconic author of “Goodbye, Columbus” is revealed in a warts-and-all telling.
When Philip Roth began his literary career in the 1950s, he started at the University of Chicago, where he said his ambitions were simple: “bibliography by day, women by night.” That’s something of a blunt organizing principle for Blake Bailey’s hotly-anticipated biography, “Philip Roth” (Norton, 912 pp., ★★★☆). It’s a well-researched and engrossing book, but at times a frustratingly narrow one, despite its heft.
The arc of Roth’s life is American literary folklore now. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he scandalized the Jewish American community he grew up in with his 1959 story collection “Goodbye, Columbus.” With his sexually irreverent 1969 novel “Portnoy’s Complaint,” he scandalized everybody else.
His two marriages were disastrous, in no small part thanks to his epic philandering. He fumed endlessly about his first wife, Maggie Martinson, who trapped him by using another woman’s urine to deliver a positive pregnancy test. A memoir by his second wife, Claire Bloom, prompted him to write an enraged 295-page retort that friends had to persuade him to keep in the drawer.
Fury – about relationships, politics and mortality – powered a late renaissance that fueled modern classics such as 1995’s “Sabbath’s Theater” and 2000’s “The Human Stain.” By the time he died of heart failure in 2018, at 85, he hadn’t won the Nobel Prize he felt he deserved, but he’d won pretty much everything else. He had absorbed, and sometimes courted, years of brickbats for alleged anti-Semitism and misogyny and died with his reputation intact, if problematic.
Bailey ably documents the lifelong squabbles over his cancel-worthiness but sidesteps making a ruling. His marching orders from Roth, quoted as the book’s epigraph, were simple: “I don’t want you to rehabilitate me. Just make me interesting.” Still, Bailey’s biography is a product of particular decisions. First among them is to read his fiction through the lens of autobiography, to parse which lover, wife, or literary rival found its way into his often selfreferential fiction.
The second is to reveal his paternalistically controlling side. He stage-managed how his work was presented, cantankerously fussing over the Library of America reissues of his books. More offputting, he stage-managed people. He once asked a girlfriend to document their affair, the better to use it as novelistic fodder. He attempted to anonymously pay a girlfriend, novelist Lisa Halliday, a stipend if she would live near him and not get married. When Halliday called him out on it, he refused to speak to her for nearly a year.
There’s a downside to all of Bailey’s diligent, dishy accounting of scandals and mapping of Roth’s life to his novels: A reader interested in Roth’s fiction might reasonably wonder what all the fuss is about. Roth was a diligent reviser and thinker about the American scene and a champion of dissident writers. None of that is as seductive as his romantic history. But it means his evolution and value as a writer gets shorter shrift in Bailey’s book. Roth was determined as a writer, he said, to “let the repellent in.” A stronger biography might’ve shown how he did that, and why it might matter for the writers who’ll follow him.