Other views of ‘Philip Roth’
Everywhere you look are reviews, essays and other takes on Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth, sometimes varying widely. Here are snippets from a few.
“At just under 900 pages,
the book is most thoroughly a sprawling apologia for Roth’s treatment of women, on and off the page, and a minutely detailed account of his victimization at the hands of his two wives. ... Bailey is strangely reticent on the work.” — Parul Sehgal, “In ‘Philip Roth,’ a Life of the Literary Master as Aggrieved Playboy” (The New York Times)
“In Bailey, Roth found
a biographer who is exceptionally attuned to his grievances and rarely challenges his moral accounting. Yet the result is not a final winning of the argument, as Roth might have hoped. ...
(T)his sympathetic biography makes him a spiteful obsessive.” —
Laura Marsh, “Philip Roth’s Revenge Fantasy” (The New Republic)
“Most of all, though, apart from
his legendary discipline as a tireless multi-draft-hewing craftsman, Roth’s odysseys — good, bad and ugly — revolved around women. He has been tarred by some feminists as misogynistic. But
Roth argued — and Bailey offers substantial evidence for the defense — that the novelist’s most serious problems weren’t with all women but with two particular women: the ones he had the misfortune to marry.” — Alexander C. Kafka, “‘Philip Roth,’ by Blake Bailey, is a colorful, confident and uncompromising biographical triumph” (The Washington Post)
“The 19th-century novel lives on.
Its name today is Biography; its nature is that of Dostoyevskian magnitude. And Blake Bailey’s comprehensive life of Philip Roth — to tell it outright — is a narrative masterwork both of wholeness and particularity, of crises wedded to character, of character erupting into insight, insight into desire, and desire into destiny. ...(I)f fallingsout with ardently consensual women were mainly Roth’s doings, earning him the misogynist label, how to explain his ruptures with longstanding friends who were men? ... The biographer’s unintrusive everyday prose is unseen and unheard; yet under Bailey’s strong light what remains on the page is one writer’s life as it was lived, and — almost — as it was felt.” — Cynthia Ozick, “Cynthia Ozick Calls the New Philip Roth Biography a ‘Narrative Masterwork’ ” (New York Times Book Review)