Book Review
Title: Philip Roth: The Biography
Author: Blake Bailey
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st Edition (Hardcover)
Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0393240726
This biography of Philip Roth (19-March-1933 – 22-May-2018) presents a mix of Roth’s personal and literary life—with a more emphasis on the personal. In fact, my main criticism of the book is that it spends too much time belaboring the minute details of Roth’s personal-life miseries and disasters. The prolonged jeremiads and relentless physical and emotional sufferings become painfully tedious too often. Cutting some of that out, the book might’ve been trimmed to about 600 pages, instead of the lengthy 807 pages (not counting notes, appendix, etc.). On the other hand, that might not give the full picture of Roth’s life.
Roth enjoyed a stable, secure, and relatively happy childhood in Newark, New Jersey (Weequahic neighborhood), with family summers at the Jersey shore. He had a healthy academic life, earning a B.A. magna cum laude in English (elected to Phi Beta Kappa) at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, and, with a scholarship, earned an M.A. in English literature at the University of Chicago. But in adulthood, the happiness mostly ended.
Roth made poor choices in both of his marriages (self admission), and lived much of his life in miserable relationships. But not all: part of his life, mercifully, was blessed with some very happy non-marital relationships. The author spends a lot of time detailing arguments and other conversations, many verbatim (based on various journals and interviews), and many, in my opinion, not worth recording.
Roth loved the bustling city life in his New York City apartment, although to ensure quiet when he wanted it, he bought up the apartments all around him, beside, above, and below (p. 704). He also liked the less hectic life in his Connecticut getaway, where he hosted social gatherings from his extensive list of friends. The social gatherings at these and other locations are also described in some detail, which, in this case, really added color to the book. The attendees constitute a Who’s Who of literary lights and other celebrities of the time.
Roth’s early and primary literary influences were Henry James, William Faulkner, Gustav Flaubert, Sherwood Anderson, and Joseph Conrad. Later he revered novelists Saul Bellow and John Updike more than any others. Roth also greatly respected, and was friends with, William Styron. The author offers some interesting tidbits such as, according to Styron, Roth is partly the model for the character Nathan Landau in Styron’s bestseller, Sophie’s Choice (p. 186), which was published in 1979.
The author does a good job reporting on the period during which Roth rose from obscurity to fame. Roth’s first really successful writing was the short story “The Conversion of the Jews” (written in 1958, published in the Paris Review in 1959). Roth’s second successful piece of writing was his novella Goodbye, Columbus (1959), which suddenly catapulted him to literary renown. The novella won the National Book Award—Roth was the youngest author ever to win that award. Saul Bellow declared Roth a virtuoso at age 26 (p. 171).
Roth experienced repeated acclaim with his steady outflow of successful novels and other writings, finally numbering thirty-one books during his lifetime. The author emphasizes Roth’s monk-like daily writing discipline, which sharpened his expertise as well as enabled his prolific output. Roth’s final novel, Nemesis (2010), was lauded as a masterpiece and “a triumphant return to high form” (p. 748). Roth was 77 years old.
The author highlights this striking accomplishment—Roth is unique in that he wrote so many books universally acclaimed as masterpieces, and unique in that two of his greatest novels were 50 years apart: Goodbye, Columbus and Nemesis. No other novelist comes close to this accomplishment, consistency, and longevity.
As for the twenty-nine books in-between, posterity has dubbed most of them major or minor masterpieces, with few exceptions. The author shows us Roth’s varying attitudes towards the critical responses. He tried not to read them, but often couldn’t resist and gave in. Other times he was quick to find the first review being published. A common theme in all the reviews throughout his lifetime was that the reviewers completely failed to understand the book, whether the review was good or bad.
Roth accumulated a lion’s share of literary awards as well. American Pastoral, for example, won the Pulitzer prize in 1998. Other books garnered the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Roth was often a repeat-winner—many books won the same awards over time, and there was a real diversity of awards. The Human Stain, for example, won the United Kingdom’s WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year, as well as two awards from France: the Prix Médicis Étranger, and the Commander of the Legion of Honor; in 2011, the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement (approx. $80,000); and in 2012, the Prince of Asturias Award for literature and the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction. He won the Gold Medal In Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001.
Many major universities bestowed honorary doctorates upon Roth, including Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Columbia, and Rutgers, among others. Many of Roth’s novels became Hollywood movies. The author notes that Roth viewed the movie version of Goodbye, Columbus as the best movie ever made of his books (p. 783).
The author brings out Roth’s disillusionment with the steady deterioration of the reading public over the decades, as television made people read less and less. The general population’s march towards illiteracy had an impact on his readership. He noted that, among writers, he and Updike were “the last pre-television generation” (p. 334). As television implacably dumbed down the populous, there followed “the inevitable decline of ‘people who read serious books seriously and consistently’” … “Someday soon, said Roth, reading novels would be as ‘cultic’ an activity as reading ‘Latin poetry.’” (p. 751).
I definitely recommend the book. Despite the book’s flaws, Philip Roth is an important literary figure and this book gives us greater understanding of his work. I recommend the book for anyone interested in literature, writers in general, or anyone interested in twentieth-century history.