I STARTED READING this not long after it came out--actually, about the time all those revelations about its author, Blake Bailey, came out, and the cancellation that ensued. I wrote an interim post about it on June 11, 2021. Not long after, my interest flagged and I shelved the book unfinished.
But then the Steven Zipperstein book appeared. I very much wanted to read it, but thought, eh, I should finish the Bailey bio first. And I have finished it.
Among Oscar Wilde's more famous sayings is the one about putting merely his talent into his works, while putting his genius into his life. Roth definitely did it the other way around: He managed his life with a fair amount of talent, but he saved his genius for his works. I suspect that work, his corpus, will scrape through to posterity, losing a bit of bit of flesh to the Scylla of political correctness but avoiding the Charybdis of literary oblivion. If people are still reading novels written in English in the 22nd century, I bet Roth's will be among those being read.
The main problem with Bailey's biography is that he is not that interested in Roth's novels. He is interested in what Roth professed of his intentions for each novel. He notes how well each novel was reviewed, what awards it received, and how well it sold. He is definitely interested in which of a novel's characters resemble people Roth knew, and he has some interesting revelations on this front (e.g., Faunia in The Human Stain and Drenka in Sabbath's Theater). He is not all that interested, though, in what was distinctive about Roth as a novelist, or the shape of his career, or why his overall accomplishment is worth contemplating.
In other words, while this biography will long remain a useful resource for scholars of Roth, it does not measure up to Ellmann on Joyce, Bate on Keats, or Boyd on Nabokov.
I'm hoping the Zipperstein book does Roth's work--which is, I would maintain, the work of a genius--greater justice.
(By the way, if you did not see Joshua Cohen's review of Bailey's biography in the March, 2021 issue of Harper's, you should look it up.)
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