"Philip Roth: The Biography" by Blake Bailey

The first thing you notice about Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey is the size of the book – more than 800 pages of biography. Add the acknowledgements, the footnotes, and the index, and you have almost 900 pages. If there was ever meant to be a definitive biography of the American author of 31 works, including Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint, this is it.  

That it is the authorized biography by Roth himself, giving Bailey access to files, archives, letters, and friends’ interviews, also helps explain the breadth of the book. Bailey covers Roth’s life, and especially his publishing life, in detail. The fact that Bailey keeps the story interesting and engaging is due to both the biographer’s skill and Roth himself. 

 

Published earlier this year, Philip Roth received widespread and enormous critical praise – until accusations of sexual harassment, assault, and impropriety were leveled against Bailey (including via The New York Times). Eventually, the controversy led the publisher, W.W. Norton, to announce it was stopping the shipping of the book. Bailey had just run smack into cancel culture. At last report, no criminal charges had been filed against Bailey. The author has denied the accusations.

 

The biography tells Roth’s story – and it is indeed Roth’s story. That said, it is also a factual and objective story. The Philip Roth in these pages is the Philip Roth who was a major literary figure in American letters for more than half a century, winner of both a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. And it is the Philip Roth, the flawed man who made bad marriages and was unfaithful to his wives. He moved in literary circles, and at times the biography reads almost like a who‘s who in American literature. People like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, William Styron, George Plimpton, Wallace Stegner, Bennett Cerf, John Updike, Francine du Plessix Gray, Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud, and many others move through the story. So do celebrities like Claire Bloom, Roth’s second wife, and Mia Farrow, Roth’s close friend.

 

Blake Bailey

To read the story of Philip Roth is to read the story of American literature in the second half of the 20^th century. And Roth’s importance can’t be underestimated. He broke literary taboos. He influenced countless writers. He helped shape the course of literary culture for two generations. And Bailey more than does justice to that story, describing each of Roth’s works and how they were received both critically and popularly. 

 

The biography also covers the influence of Roth’s Jewish-American roots and family. Many of his novels were about Jewish-American characters, and his work more than once offended Jewish readers and religious figures. Roth considered himself an atheist and was not observant in the Jewish faith. He also visited Israel several times and met with leading political and cultural figures in the country. He was also close to his family and especially his older brother.

 

Bailey has published biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He’s received numerous literary awards and recognitions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American academy of Arts and Letters, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and others. He lives in Virginia. 

 

In short, Philip Roth is a masterful biography, and Bailey has accomplished likely even more than Roth himself would have hoped for. The Roth who emerges here is a complex and complicated man, capable of both spite and extreme generosity and well aware of his failures and shortcomings.