Philip Roth: The Biography, by Blake Bailey. W. W. Norton. 912 pages. $40.
I ’ve never understood what others make out of non-fiction. Me, I used to make fiction out of it, but that was a while ago and I’m talking about regular people. I’m talking about you people, who apparently even now keep buying and library-borrowing, perhaps even reading, masses of these vast, fact-teeming books whose genre swears to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. What exactly do you want from them? I can’t imagine you read history for the same reason I did, to cherry-pick period details to use in novels. And what about biographies? Do you read them out of curiosity, envy, jealousy? Do you read them only for comparison? That’s what I did, back when I was alive: I read other lives