Philip Roth, _Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013_

Much as I love Library of America--I think I own about thirty--I did not get any of the Roth volumes because I already own all his books, and shelf space is enough of a problem around here as it is without getting into duplicates. Had to bite on this one, though, as it is the only way I will have in book form the last 20-odd years of prose pieces, collected here as "Explanations" (accompanying Shop Talk and most of Reading Myself and Others). A hundred and some pages is in effect what I got for my $35, but what the hell. It's Roth, and Roth is priceless.

I sat down to read through "Explanations" after I saw the news that he was gone. A good many of the selections are speeches he made accepting various awards (why did the news coverage so often mention his not getting the Nobel? A peculiar thing to dwell on, I think). He is unfailingly eloquent, generous, gracious. He shows some spark in the open letter to Wikipedia on the topic of "real life models" of his fictional characters, a subject on which he often got sparky. But he's in a benign  mood in most of these pieces, and even unbends enough to acknowledges that Murray Ringgold, the exemplary teacher of I Married a Communist, was largely based on one of his own teachers from Weequahic High, Bob Lowenstein.

So, my mind wandered to a topic possibly even less á propos than his not getting the Nobel. With even such apparently benign figures as Charlie Rose, Bill Cosby, and even Garrison Keillor getting called on their sexually predatory activities, it becomes interesting that no one has talked about being abused or harassed by Philip Roth. Apparently (not that I've read it) he even comes off acceptably in the new Lisa Halliday novel. Could it be--even though, to judge from his fiction, he had one of American letters' busier libidos and more shameless imaginations--that the creator of Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh, and (for crying out loud) Mickey Sabbath was a perfect gentleman?

Having said that, I have to keep in mind that something could emerge at any time. But he must not have been a Harvey Weinstein, even though Harvey Weinstein seems like someone Roth could have invented.

By the way, why was Reading Myself and Others not included in its entirety? The exclusion of the Nixon-related pieces I understand, to a degree, although I do not approve. The exclusion of the bracingly acerbic unsent letter to Diana Trilling on her review of Portnoy's Complaint ("Document Dated July 27, 1969") I neither understand nor approve. The absence of "The Newark Public Library" and "My Baseball Years"--two of my very favorite Roth essays--I genuinely regret.