When Philip Roth died on May 22, 2018, he’d cemented his reputation as a great American novelist twice over. In the '70s, thanks to “Portnoy’s Complaint,” he’d 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., ★★★ out of four), those accomplishments gave him little comfort in his final years. He was infamously resentful of being denied the Nobel Prize in literature: “He took to calling it the Anybody-But-Roth Prize,” Taylor reports. 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.”
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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 middle-class New Jersey upbringing into high art.
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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 the pages of “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 the actress Ava Gardner, and loved to imagine poor relations like “Paprika Roth, a retired stripper living in the Florida panhandle.”
But Taylor also sensed that 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 a handful 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 that 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.”
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May 18, 2020 at 06:04PM
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Review: Longtime friend writes intimate, unvarnished portrait of Philip Roth in 'Here We Are' - USA TODAY
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