Philip Roth and the repellent What is most disturbing in Blake Bailey’s biography is not Roth’s behaviour, but his biographer’s apparently unthinking alignment with it. On page 700 of Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth, we find Roth reading Greg Bellow’s memoir of his father,
Saul Bellow’s Heart. Roth and Bellow had a complex relationship, meticulously detailed in Bailey’s book. The pair first met in 1957, when Roth was just starting out as a writer and teaching at the University of Chicago; Bellow arrived as a visiting writer and bestowed the blessing of his admiration on the younger man. But Bellow called