In Blake Bailey’s hands, Roth is the Nice Jewish Boy - from a working-class household in the Weequahic section of Newark in the 1940s, where middle-class Jews were saved, by the luck of their geography, from Nazi genocide - pitted against his lascivious life, literary scandals, psychoanalysis, chronic pain and novels about the American dream, sex, death and, always, Jews.Īs a student at Bucknell and the University of Chicago, Roth fell under the influence of Malamud and Bellow.
If Roth’s 1974 characterization seems like having it both ways, it’s also the ideal paradox for a biographer. Put another way, every Roth book, 31 between 19, says something about the kind of person, and novelist, he was, and the kind of bondage he fashioned. Of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and himself, Roth added this qualifier: “it is no wonder that the … (fiction of these writers), whatever may be their differences in literary merit and approach, are largely nightmares of bondage, each informed in its way by a mood of baffled, claustrophobic struggle.” Perhaps Oz hadn’t read Roth’s 1974 essay, “Imagining Jews,” where he puts the subject of Jewish fiction plainly: The Jewish writer’s “enterprise … (is) imagining Jews being imagined, by themselves and by others.” Thus, Oz stomps on Portnoy, Zuckerman, Levov, Sabbath and a fistful of Roth’s fictional protagonists.
Oz recounts how his grandparents, before emigrating from Odessa, Ukraine, to British-mandated Palestine, had intended to come to America, “in which case I might have been born … in Newark, New Jersey, and written clever novels in English about the passions and inhibitions of top-hatted immigrants and the neurotic ordeals of their agonized progeny.” Photo: SARA KRULWICH, STF / NYTĮarly in his 2003 memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” Israeli writer Amos Oz kicks Philip Roth in the shins. The late prolific author whose novels depicted the American dream, sex, death and Jews, is the subject of Blake Bailey’s biography.
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