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Philip Roth: A Counterlife
This new biography of famed American novelist Philip Roth offers a full account of his development as a writer.
Philip Roth was much more than a Jewish writer from Newark, as this new biography reveals. His life encompassed writing some of the most original novels in American literature, publishing censored writers from Eastern Europe, surviving less than satisfactory marriages, and developing friendships with a number of the most important writers of his time from Primo Levi and Milan Kundera to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow and Edna O'Brien. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize, Roth maintained a remarkable productivity throughout a career that spanned almost fifty years, creating 31 works. But beneath the success was illness, angst, and anxiety often masked from his readers. This biography, drawing on archives, interviews and his books, delves into the shaded world of Philip Roth to identify the ghosts, the character, and even identity of the man.
Philip Roth was much more than a Jewish writer from Newark, as this new biography reveals. His life encompassed writing some of the most original novels in American literature, publishing censored writers from Eastern Europe, surviving less than satisfactory marriages, and developing friendships with a number of the most important writers of his time from Primo Levi and Milan Kundera to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow and Edna O'Brien. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize, Roth maintained a remarkable productivity throughout a career that spanned almost fifty years, creating 31 works. But beneath the success was illness, angst, and anxiety often masked from his readers. This biography, drawing on archives, interviews and his books, delves into the shaded world of Philip Roth to identify the ghosts, the character, and even identity of the man.
576 pages, Hardcover
Published March 10, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 12, 2026
If you're going to set yourself up as more independent than an official biographer, then your book ought to offer something different and be better than, in this case, Blake Bailey's. Nadel fails. He briefly introduces characters ahead of their time, chronologically and then, some pages later reintroduces them, as if we all had memory lapses, with much the same words and at greater length. He swings wildly between a present and a past, then back again, without moorings or a purpose given for his method. Did he not have an editor? I won't even get into some truly ugly sentence construction. His Life doesn't seem that revelatory: Roth hated women, treated them badly, and also treated male friends badly, only not so badly. We know this.
Of course Nadel goes over the Nobel. Roth never deserved it. (The only current u.s. writer I can think of who does is Vollmann.) His works feature himself, in various guises, and that's simply not world-embracing enough. (His championing of eastern european writers was laudable and important. But it's not his own writing.)
If you had to choose between Bailey and Nadel, consider Bailey, whatever his reputation now. (If you're reading Roth anyway, then Bailey's reputation likely won't seem so strange.) I can't really recommend this Life because it purports to be something else, something counter, but comes off as badly organized and a bit full of itself.
Of course Nadel goes over the Nobel. Roth never deserved it. (The only current u.s. writer I can think of who does is Vollmann.) His works feature himself, in various guises, and that's simply not world-embracing enough. (His championing of eastern european writers was laudable and important. But it's not his own writing.)
If you had to choose between Bailey and Nadel, consider Bailey, whatever his reputation now. (If you're reading Roth anyway, then Bailey's reputation likely won't seem so strange.) I can't really recommend this Life because it purports to be something else, something counter, but comes off as badly organized and a bit full of itself.
July 28, 2023
Ira Nadel's biography of Philip Roth is a fascinating, meticulously detailed exploration of the author's life and work. It neither vilifies nor whitewashes the controversial but great novelist. This unauthorized biography extensively covers his upbringing in a quintessentially Jewish part of Newark, memorialized in his masterpiece American Pastoral, his popularity in high school, his fine education at Bucknell and University of Chicago, his meteoric literary success, and his prodigious sexual relationships with women. I read the biography to try to understand the source of his endless rage and compulsive love/hate relationship with women. He had an adoring father and mother, a devoted, very creative brother, and many lifelong friends. He was blessed with great looks, charm and an outrageous sense of humor. I'm just as baffled as I was at the beginning of the book.
July 9, 2024
Not so much sloppily edited as seemingly not even glanced at a second time, its a mess, stuffed with grammatical errors and repeated information (including in one instance a footnote repeated in the main text immediately after)
June 11, 2023
The last giant.
February 10, 2023
This is a great biography - it didn't get the attention it deserved because of the whole Blake Bailey crap. REad it - lots of great insights!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews