Philip Roth 2002 (Dennis Van Tine/ABACAPRESS.COM)
The reviews of Blake Bailey’s
Philip Roth: The Biography have been pouring out on both sides of the Atlantic. What is striking is how badly written the British ones have been and how smart the American ones are. What makes the British reviews so much worse?
First, the bizarre omissions. Tim Adams’s review in
The Observer of Bailey’s biography doesn’t use the words “Jew” or “Jewish” once. This is extraordinary. Not only was Roth Jewish, he wrote constantly about Jews, from Anne Frank and Kafka to his own fictional characters Portnoy and Zuckerman. Roth couldn’t have been more Jewish. It’s not just the Jewish subject matter. Above all, it’s the voice, that distinctive mix of high and low, funny and serious. “If Yahweh wanted me to be calm,” he writes in