USA TODAY International Edition
Friend shares raw portrait of Roth
When Philip Roth died on May 22, 2018, he had cemented his reputation as a great American novelist twice over. In the ‘ 70s, thanks to “Portnoy’s Complaint,” he had become the country’s premier satirist of society in general and Jewish American culture in particular. By the 2000s his writing was more sober but no less irreverent, skewering pieties and prejudices in “The Human Stain” and “The Plot Against America,” his speculative novel about the United States’ descent into fascism.
On the evidence of Benjamin Taylor’s “Here We Are: My Friendship With Philip Roth” ( Penguin, 192 pp., ★★★☆), those accomplishments gave him little comfort in his final years. He was infamously resentful of being denied the Nobel Prize in literature. And past slights consumed him. Taylor notes that Roth couldn’t stop relitigating his first marriage, and that “despite her death she needed further – no, endless – pulverization.”
Taylor, a novelist and professor, shares these less- than- flattering details not to diminish his longtime friend, but to model the candor that Roth demanded. All the criticisms leveled against Roth get space in this brief remembrance: the misogyny, the self- destructive libido, the urge to deliberately offend. But Taylor frames them as either overstated or parts of a man in full who turned his romantic misadventures and middleclass New Jersey upbringing into high art.
No question, defiance was essential to his being as a writer. Of his scorching 1995 novel, “Sabbath’s Theater,” he tells Taylor that “my grown- up – grown- old – purpose was to violate every canon of seemliness and good taste, to affront and affront till there was no one left to affront.”
Taylor’s relationship with Roth is a peculiar one in “Here I Am.” At times it’s a friendship of equals. They share meals at a mediocre Manhattan Italian
joint Roth dubs the Meatball, and Taylor recalls conversations about flings, literature and history rich with gossip and humor. Roth shares that he had a brief relationship with actress Ava Gardner and loved to imagine poor relations like “Paprika Roth, a retired stripper living in the Florida panhandle.” But Taylor also sensed their bond was asymmetrical, and that Roth held some secrets close: “He managed to figure out more about me than I ever could about him,” he writes. At times he’s more a reporter than confidante, and though he bore witness to the worst of Roth’s final days, wracked by painkillers and dementia, the author remains a cryptic figure, seen from a distance.
A more complete picture will likely emerge when Blake Bailey’s full- dress Roth biography is published. Still, for Roth fans, Taylor’s book is essential reading, an affectionate but never sentimental portrait of the furious, divisive and comic personality who produced some of the past century’s finest novels.
In conversation with Taylor, Roth was confident enough to place himself in the company of Walt Whitman, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. But he was modest enough to feel a certain damage was required to join the club. “They’re heartbroken patriots,” he tells Taylor. “Looking back now, I see it’s what I’ve been too.”