Roth and the critics

The reviews of Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography have been pouring out on both sides of the Atlantic. What is striking is how badly written the British ones have been and how smart the American ones are. What makes the British reviews so much worse?

First, the bizarre omissions. Tim Adams’s review in The Observer of Bailey’s biography doesn’t use the words “Jew” or “Jewish” once. This is extraordinary. Not only was Roth Jewish, he wrote constantly about Jews, from Anne Frank and Kafka to his own fictional characters Portnoy and Zuckerman. Roth couldn’t have been more Jewish. It’s not just the Jewish subject matter. Above all, it’s the voice, that distinctive mix of high and low, funny and serious. “If Yahweh wanted me to be calm,” he writes in Sabbath’s Theater, “he would have made me a goy.” “Jewish morality, Jewish endurance, Jewish wisdom, Jewish families,” Henry Zuckerman tells his brother Nathan, “— everything is grist for your fun-machine.” Roth was once asked what is distinctive about Jewish writing. It is about a particular kind of sensibility, he replied, “the nervousness, the excitability, the arguing, the dramatising, the indignation, the obsessiveness, the touchiness, the play-acting – above all the talking.” That’s how Jewish Roth was. For Tim Adams not to use the words “Jew” or “Jewish” even once in his review should make alarm bells ring. To be fair, he uses the word Judaism once. But to be precise, he mis-spells it as “Judasim”.

This is just the beginning of Adams’s catalogue of omissions. Roth was not only a great writer, but he was also a great reader and critic. No one wrote better about Bellow. Bailey reveals what a voracious reader Roth was and which writers mattered to him. Curiously, Adams’s review doesn’t mention important writers for Roth like Bellow, Malamud and Updike, Appelfeld, Kafka and Primo Levi, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Kundera. These writers changed the way Roth thought about his Jewishness, about how a writer finds his voice, about the Holocaust and central Europe. It’s not just that he met nearly all of these writers (except of course Kafka, who died a decade before Roth was born) — they transformed his own writing. 

Saul Bellow in 1966 (PA)

Then there are the places that mattered to Roth. Newark, of course. Adams writes, Roth “was rooted in the small-town [sic] values in the Newark of his youth.” “Small-town”? When Roth was a teenager, Newark had a Jewish population of more than 50,000, more than fifty synagogues, almost twenty in Roth’s neighbourhood alone. That was just the Jews. In 1940, when Roth was seven, Newark had a population of 430,000. What about the other places that mattered to Roth? Israel? Prague? Nothing. 

Then there’s Blake Morrison’s review in The Guardian. He mentions “Jew” and “Jewish” once each, just in passing. He also manages to mention Bellow and Updike once as well and refers vaguely to “novelists from Eastern Europe”. Otherwise, it’s all about women and sex. Of course, much of Bailey’s biography is about women: Roth’s affairs, especially with younger women, and his two disastrous marriages. Morrison tells us that a Playboy pin-up called Roth “a sex fiend” and Nell Freudenberger said, “I don’t like the way he writes about women.” But what about the writing? What made him one of the two greatest post-war American novelists? 

The worst of all, is Tomiwa Owolade’s review in the London Evening Standard. He calls Roth “the child of an upwardly mobile family”. Not really. His father worked for the same insurance company for more than thirty years and part of the success of Roth’s breakthrough book, Goodbye, Columbus, was his acute ear for class. It’s the Patimkins, not Roth’s own family, who are upwardly mobile. As Bellow wrote in his review, “The hero of Jewish fiction two decades ago knew nothing of Jewish suburbs, country clubs, organised cancer fund drives, large sums of money, cars, mink, or jewelry.” That is “upwardly mobile”.

Owolade writes, “[Roth] moved to Chicago to become a college instructor after his stint in the navy and married in 1959.” Roth did teach Freshman composition, but he was also a PhD candidate at Chicago. He served in the US army, not the navy. 

“Roth,” Owolade writes, “was cancelled many times during his life — for his alleged misogyny and anti-Semitism.” What does any of this mean? Roth published 31 books, was awarded many prestigious prizes and taught for much of his career at a number of eminent universities. In what possible sense was he “cancelled many times”? By whom? His “alleged misogyny” is a simplification of a very complicated story. Roth had numerous close women friends. In his biography, Ira Nadel writes, “important female friendships included Lillian Hellman, Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag, Edna O’Brien, Hermione Lee, Veronica Geng, Janet Malcom, Judith Thurman, Claudia Roth Pierpont, Wendy Strothman (editor), and, more recently, the writers Louise Erdrich, Nicole Krauss, and Zadie Smith.” As Bailey points out, Julia Golier and Mia Farrow both spoke at his funeral and Zadie Smith gave the first annual Philip Roth Lecture. Perhaps they didn’t get the memo about his “alleged misogyny”? As for Roth’s alleged “anti-Semitism”: it’s a strange word to use about one of America’s two greatest Jewish novelists, whose friends included some of the greatest Jewish writers and artists of the 20th century. Badly written, full of errors and slack assertions, this is a shockingly bad review.

Zadie Smith 2017 (Miquel Llop/NurPhoto)

If a bunch of Sixth Formers submitted these reviews as essays there would be red ink everywhere. This is what passes for reviews of the biography of a famous writer in some of our best-known newspapers. 

If you want to read grown-up reviews, try America’s literary magazines. Their reviews are longer, smarter and give a sense of what kind of reader and writer Roth was — and they mention that he was Jewish. So far, there have been reviews by James Parker in The Atlantic, Joshua Cohen in Harper’s Magazine, David Remnick in The New Yorker and Michael Gorra in The New York Review of Books, with more to come, hopefully including big guns like Steven Zipperstein, Adam Kirsch and Robert Alter. These are essays, most of them between 5000 and 7000 words, not short articles. But the real difference is how much more interesting they are than the British reviews. The authors are class acts. Cohen is one of America’s best writers (as readers of his forthcoming novel, The Netanyahus, will soon find out); Remnick is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Editor of The New Yorker; Michael Gorra wrote the hugely acclaimed book, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, and has taught at Smith College for more than 35 years. 

They ask all the right questions. Bailey, writes Gorra, is a curious figure for Roth to have chosen as his biographer, “For as Roth himself asked at their first interview in 2012, why should a ‘gentile from Oklahoma’ write his story, when his previous biographies had all been about WASP alcoholics?”

They also spot the interesting details about Bailey’s book as a biography. “There are relatively few quotations from letters here,” writes Gorra, “though the ones that there are suggest that a volume of Roth’s correspondence will be worth having. There’s almost nothing from a journal or diary.” Gorra is also very good on who Bailey has interviewed. “We listen as the novelist’s friends think aloud and at times second-guess themselves, hear them describe his relation to them as much as theirs to him,” he writes. “In consequence these secondary figures become exceptionally vivid, and that ability to animate his minor characters seems to me Bailey’s most distinctive gift… Philip Roth comes as brightly peopled as a Victorian novel, with detailed portraits of its subject’s lovers, his college teachers at Bucknell, writer friends like Bernard Avishai and Judith Thurman…”

They do an excellent job of cherry-picking the best quotations from Bailey’s book. Remnick notes that in the taxi on the way to his first wife’s funeral, the driver turned to Roth and said, “Got the good news early, huh?” “Roth, Bailey writes, “realised he’d been whistling the entire ride.” That sentence tells you all you need to know about the marriage. Roth was a workaholic. “If he was not in his studio by nine,” writes Remnick, “he would think, ‘Malamud has already been at it for two hours.’”

Above all, they are aware of Bailey’s limitations. He is a biographer not a critic, offering short summaries of the novels and reviews rather than interesting literary analysis. There’s far too much about Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint and far too little about the great novels of the 1990s. Eli, The Fanatic, one of the best post-war American short stories, gets three pages. The Ghost Writer, Roth’s best novel in the quarter of a century between Portnoy and Sabbath’s Theater, gets the same. “He’s not really a critic,” writes Gorra, “and he isn’t that interested in the inner life of the fiction itself.” There’s “hardly any literary analysis that isn’t summary,” Cohen agrees.    

Unlike the British reviewers, the Americans get the balance between the sex and the literature right. They know it’s the writing that matters. Crucially, they get Roth’s Jewishness right. Cohen gets straight to the heart of this issue.  Roth “was the major Jewish writer of the first generation of Jews who could legitimately claim to be one hundred percent American.” He fits the words “Jews” and “Jewish” into this sentence more often than Adams can manage in his entire review. 

If you want to know about Roth and East European writers, take this sentence from Remnick’s review in the New Yorker: “We learn of Roth’s generosity; of his remarkable service in getting Milan Kundera, Danilo Kis, Bruno Schulz, and other Eastern European writers published in English.” Why? Because they mattered so much to Roth. Why did they matter to him? Because they helped him come to terms with modern history and with his Jewishness. That junction, between central Europe and being a Jewish American, between modern history in Newark and in Prague, mattered to Roth, it matters to Bailey’s best reviewers and that’s why it should matter to his British reviewers. What a pity that, apparently, it does not.

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