Philip Roth: The Biography

By Blake Bailey, Skyhorse Publishing, 2021, 960 pages
Reviewed by Angela Allen, July 2, 2021

I’m the only person I know who has read, and actually finished, the 807-page (plus 99 pages of footnotes and index) Philip Roth biography.

When “Philip Roth: A Biography” first was published in April, it was quickly withdrawn by W.W. Norton & Co. due to sexual allegations leveled against the biographer, Blake Bailey. The biography has since been picked up by Skyhorse, a publisher of books by such controversial characters as Michael Cohen, Woody Allen and Roger Stone.

As Tony Lyons, Skyhorse president, said, “The fact is that fewer and fewer publishers are willing to take on the tough books.”

And now you can buy this weighty book in paperback, and Amazon appears to have hardbacks.

The bio is way too long, but I kept reading. After all, Roth wrote 31 books and won almost every literary prize, some several times, except the Nobel. When Bob Dylan won the Nobel in 2016, Roth was asked what he thought. “It’s OK,” he said, “but next year I hope Peter, Paul and Mary get it.”

Roth is funny and worked very, very hard as a novelist and, off and on, as a visiting university writing teacher. He had a lot more literary than marital success. His first marriage was to “the shiksa of all shiksas,” (a gentile woman) as he referred to Maggie Martinson, and the second was to British actress Claire Bloom, whose 1996 “Leaving a Doll’s House” memoir accused Roth of misogyny and manic-depression (Roth spent the rest of his life bitter toward her and trying to discredit the memoir). He loved being with younger women and had hundreds of friends — many famous, many not so much, many he slept with, and some of whom he kept for a lifetime.

He gave away lots of money to acquaintances and friends in need, as well as championed dissident Eastern European writers.

This book is packed so full of info, intel and insights, that I could write about 1 million things (no worries, I won’t). Extensive reviews appeared in publications, including The New Yorker, and the book emerged amid great expectations. Roth was, after all, a colorful, dramatic person, and he kept meticulous diaries his entire writing life, making him an ideal subject for any biographer, of whom he had several until he settled on Bailey, “a goy from Oklahoma,” as Roth referred to him.

Roth was a writer who challenged contemporary political correctness in literature. Pundits consider him one of the greatest American novelists.

Roth was at the beginning of his career in 1960, when “Goodbye, Columbus,” about nouveau-riche Jews, made a big splash and won the National Book Award (Roth was 26 years old at the time). He was accused of being antisemitic, in part because he, as a Jew, wrote about Jews as flawed and tasteless. Some of the Jewish establishment only forgave him at the end of his career, when he died in 2018 at 85 years old.

If Roth could be cranky and endlessly argumentative, he had soft spots. He left the lion’s share of his substantial fortune to his beloved Newark Public Library in the community where he grew up. The first person to give the library’s annual Philip Roth Lecture was Zadie Smith. Roth’s parade of books in his 60-plus years of writing, especially the racy “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1969), influenced her writing. “He is part of the reason when I write that I do not try to create positive Black role models for my Black readers to emulate.”

So there’s a lot to like about Roth — and not to like. It’s all in this very long book. I’m glad that I read it, and I consider it a feat that I finished it.