Philip Roth: The Biography

In the funniest of his often droll footnotes, Bailey notes that, after he finished his Zuckerman trilogy, Roth had to have his typewriter repaired because the "I" had worn off. Through 31 books, including some of the most acclaimed (and most notorious) novels of the last fifty years, Roth puckishly and often perversely filtered his self through a handful of alter egos, but Bailey, who had access to all the fiction but also to hundreds of pages of unpublished missives from Roth justifying his own equally notorious existence, never gets lost in that hall of mirrors: he makes you feel, and know, a life, lived by a real, flawed person. Did I like Roth any more or less afterwards? I'm not even sure: he was both generous and vindictive, capable of great friendship with women and consumed by youth-chasing lust. But the real drama, and the reason we eagerly read an 800-page biography (at least one as good as this one), is the time he spent at that typewriter, and the artistic stamina that pushed him to write his greatest books when most writers would have coasted to the finish. And it's back to those books I want to turn next.