Must a biographer be in sympathy with their subject? The question arises for the reader on the first page of the Preface to Ira Nadel’s Philip Roth: A Counterlife, where the biographer refers to the “insecurity, anger, betrayal” that he believes are “crucial topics” in Roth’s life and work. Nadel goes on, in the Preface, to assert (rather dismissively and condescendingly, I think): “Autofiction became his specialty, with numerous narrative games added to distract the reader and perhaps himself.” Were they no more than “games”, serving only “to distract”? Surely not. The second paragraph of Nadel’s Introduction, subtitled “The History of My Discontent”, begins: “Discontent defined Roth from the beginning of his literary life,” and Nadel then refers to Roth’s “frustration at being unable to locate an inner self,” “his sustained unhappiness and anger,” and his “effort to celebrate the rude or obscene as normal.” A few pages later in the Introduction, we get the statement, “Aggression, discontent, and anger are key concepts in the lexicon and life of Philip Roth” – a fair encapsulation of Nadel’s own approach to the author, at least at the outset. It’s an unfortunate and also somewhat misleading start to a book that actually turns out to be an insightful and helpful study of the work (though not so much the life) of one of America’s major novelists.

But if the biographer adopts, at least initially, a distinctly adversarial relation to his subject, he is not without his reasons. Before the publication of Nadel’s earlier book-length study, Critical Companion to Philip Roth (2011), Roth applied considerable legal pressure to get the critic to delete a sentence he thought mischaracterized his relationship with women, and to rewrite the surrounding passage. Nadel complied, but Roth then refused to grant him permission to quote from his work in the upcoming (unauthorized) biography; though on the evidence of what we have before us, which quotes liberally from the novels, essays and letters, the proscription was later lifted. In light of this personal history, the subtitle of Nadel’s Introduction (along with its rather hostile subtext) takes on additional significance.

Throughout these opening pages, Nadel shows a reliance on psychoanalytic explanations that can seem labored and tendentious. For instance, he adduces the time Roth’s mother deliberately locked him out of the house when he was six to show “the betrayal of maternal love, if only temporarily, generating an unconscious aggression to battle any rejection.” Five years later, when they went shopping for a swimsuit and the teenaged Roth expressed his preference for one with a jockstrap, his mother replied, “What, for your little thing?” From such instances Nadel confidently (and rather clunkily) concludes, “These early betrayals forged a determination never to allow them to occur again, his self-protection aggression.”

Nadel’s psychological reading of Roth becomes more convincing, however, when later, in Chapter 4, he discusses Roth’s treatment by his psychoanalyst Hans Kleinschmidt (the original of Dr. Spielvogel in Portnoy‘s Complaint), who was particularly interested in the relation between narcissism and creative anger. In his 1967 article in American Imago titled “The Angry Act: The Role of Aggression in Creativity”, in which Roth was disguised as “a southern playwright”, Kleinschmidt stated: “…to accept love means loss of identity through the breakdown of [a] major defense, the narcissistic detachment.” Here Nadel rightly comments, “The remark has direct application to Roth and his resistance to sustained female relationships.” New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik, who also underwent psychoanalysis with Kleinschmidt, described his central approach: “You don’t want to overcome your narcissism, or self-attention, but you want to use it to build an impregnable fortress that will defend you from the world.” Apparently, Roth followed his analyst’s advice – all too well: in 1993, at the time of his second nervous collapse, he was diagnosed by his psychiatrist at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, CT., with “Histrionic/Narcissistic Personality Disorder”. 

To his credit, though, Roth seemed at least half-aware of (and sometimes chagrined by) his own narcissism. In a 1986 trip to Israel with his friend, novelist David Plante, Roth told him “he was elated, remarking that for once he was not thinking about himself: ’51 years I’ve spent thinking about myself. Not thinking about myself is what I’ve always wanted.'” There is a certain poignancy in this admission, which becomes even more striking as expressed by Roth’s favorite fictional alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, in The Anatomy Lesson (1984): “I want an active connection to life and I want it now…. I want the real thing, the thing in the raw and not for the writing but for itself.” Nadel describes what he calls “the Rothian Paradox”: urgent as this hunger for “the real thing” felt to him, “his obligation was exclusively to his work, not to his intimate psychological life. To get perspective on his work, he must withdraw….” And this withdrawal, effected in order to write, produced the “countertexts” that were, as Zuckerman well knew and often stated, the truest expression of his author’s life and work.

But the term “countertext” acquires yet another meaning in Nadel’s biography: “a critical life that directly or indirectly opposes, or at least questions, the way the subject wants to be portrayed.” And such opposition is the prerogative of the unauthorized biographer; it is Nadel’s answer, if you will, to the “official” version told by the authorized Roth biographer, Blake Bailey. (Review here:  The Written (and Unwritten) Worlds of Philip Roth.) Hence Nadel’s apt subtitle to his biography, “A Counterlife”. It falls to the “counterbiographer” to tell the deeper story. The unauthorized story. The one that hasn’t received the blessing of the author-subject. The one that perhaps runs counter to the way the author-subject himself would prefer to be portrayed. The one that – and here the Nadel biography can be read as a kind of unintentional thematic response to the Bailey biography (indeed, Nadel himself calls his a “thematic biography”) – tells the story of the work itself, the work that supplies the raison d’être of the life. All of this, despite some surface flaws in the telling, is precisely what Nadel has done.

It comes as little surprise, then, that in this work-centered, unauthorized “counterlife”, the man Roth should appear less sympathetic than in Bailey’s telling. Writer/producer Mark Richman, who fought a ten-year legal battle with Roth to make a film adaptation of his first novel, Letting Go (never produced), described Roth in print as “a man with the inner life of a roach…. A more despicable son of a bitch was never born.” New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm — with whom, Nadel tells us, Roth “maintained a lively correspondence” based on her writing – said, “The man gives nothing (yes, except to literature). He is completely selfish and manipulative. How taken in I was.” Writer and critic Alfred Kazin, who socialized and corresponded with Roth, wrote in his journal:

…I realize why I see him only for short or formal dinners…and despite the edge he fosters, am always glad to see him depart in all his prosperity and self-satisfaction. The cleverness, the sharpness, the continual edge somehow turn an evening, to say nothing of his fiction, into performance. There are no purely meditative, unexpected moments, no reflection outside professional ones.

Bailey adds this reflection from Roth’s estranged friend Jonathan Brent:

…he lives in kind of an empty world. Not intellectually empty; not artistically empty; but in some deep psychic way. And it’s an emptiness that he has cultivated very carefully. Because he can control that world. But it leaves him empty and I think he’s in great need of real love that he can’t find.

Bailey also notes a comment from Julius Goldstein, a painter who knew Roth at the Yaddo Writers’ Colony: “I think there’s something in his makeup he’s missing.”

Even the man who was his closest friend for the last ten years of his life, writer Benjamin Taylor, reports rather chillingly in his memoir Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth: 

…there were rooms in the fortress of secrets marked P. Roth that I know I was excluded from…. He was an incomparable student of inner lives, of what’s invisibly afoot. He managed to figure out more about me than I ever could about him…. His love acted on me as on everyone, like a truth serum. He possessed the terrible gift of intimacy. He caused people to tell things they told no one else. His mineral-hard stare was impossible to hide from.

Taylor also mentions, at least twice, that Roth would sometimes hang up the phone without saying goodbye – not in pique, but just because he apparently had nothing more to say. Yet I can’t help feeling this was more than just the casual, semi-facetious sort of rudeness you might feel yourself at liberty to indulge with your best friend; I think it was also Roth’s way of maintaining control of the conversation until the very end – indeed, of determining when that end would be, and how it would happen. It may also be that the abrupt hang-up was a kind of humorous “rim shot”, as it were, to punctuate the termination. But whatever it was, it stands out – to me, at any rate — as an inadvertent display of his self-involvement, if not outright narcissism. 

Novelist Janet Hobhouse, who was (briefly) a lover and then a good friend, based the character “Jack” in her novel The Furies (1993) closely on Roth. She too notes his preoccupation with secrecy, as well as his “ruthlessness”:

…one of the characteristics of our affair was his obsession with secrecy. There wasn’t the slightest gallantry in any of this; it was not my reputation he was trying to protect [the protagonist, like Hobhouse herself, was married], but his own comfort…. I feared his boredom and the ruthlessness that came with it.

The picture of Roth that emerges in Hobhouse’s lightly-fictionalized portrait (and that accords with other accounts given by friends and associates), also evokes a kind of Byronic mesmerism, tinged with more than a hint of sadism:

Once Jack set out to charm you, there was not much you could do about it. It was not just the speed of his mind, but the playfulness, the willingness to leap, dive, flick the wrist, keep the game going…. What he noticed about people was unnervingly sharp, merciless, they were as though caught in the beams of a pagan god, for whom acceptance, forgiveness, was soft and unnecessary stuff…. He’d run through me like a brush fire, and I was too young and too unsure to get up again when he left.

Another of Roth’s lovers, Lisa Halliday (all of 23 when they first got together; Roth was exactly three times her age), in her novel Asymmetry (2018), based the character of Ezra Blazer (note again the fire imagery) on Roth. Ezra displays both generosity and an intense curiosity about people — though in the latter case at least, he has an agenda. He gives $700 to the hot dog guy on the corner near his building (“I wanted to help him out”), and later in the novel, when he is hospitalized for serious chest pains, he is entranced by all the doings he sees around him: “Ezra watched spellbound, eyes bright and jaw slack; he could never get enough of humanity, so long as it slept in another room.” Ouch.

But being Roth’s wife was even harder than being his girlfriend, and his first marriage was a tempestuous disaster. Maggie Martinson Williams was four years older, and the mother of a young son and daughter by her first husband, when she and Roth met in Chicago in the fall of 1956. (Roth was not yet 24, and still in graduate school at the University of Chicago.) Maggie herself was a graduate of the Michigan school of hard knocks – one of the things that attracted Roth to her. Her father, “Red” Williams, was doing time for petty theft, and may have sexually abused her. As Nadel tells it:

Maggie appealed to Roth precisely because she was different in temperament and experience from any of the East Coast Jewish women he had known…. The idea that her father was in jail, rather than pickles or plumbing fixtures, thrilled him. She embodied everything about the unfairness of life and what his grandparents feared most in America: she was alien, a shiksa, a woman from an unstable background.

And as Roth himself tells it in his memoir The Facts, “I felt drawn to a world from which I no longer wished to be sheltered and about which a man in my intended line of work ought really to know something: the menacing realms of benighted American life that so far I had only read of in the novels of Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser.” The doomed relationship (Maggie died in a car accident in Central Park in 1968, four years after their legal separation) proved to be an invaluable lesson in his education as a writer, as Roth states explicitly in the memoir; but for Maggie, its benefits were always much less clear. By the time they married in February of 1959, she’d already had one abortion (and faked another), and Roth had cheated on her at least twice — and would continue to do so, until they finally split in 1964. (Though she would refuse to grant him a divorce, holding out for a better alimony settlement than he was willing to provide.) “Adultery,” Roth later told Bailey, “makes numerous bad marriages bearable and holds them together and in some cases can make the adulterer a far more decent husband or wife than…the domestic situation warrants.” When Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), was accepted for publication (a period he calls, in The Facts, “the most triumphant months of my life”), Maggie cried, “It isn’t fair! You have everything, and I have nothing, and now you think you can dump me!” It’s hard not to feel she had a point. Nadel concludes: 

…he wanted trouble, rebelling against the placid and conventional lives led by his parents and his Newark friends…. He wanted the mess, not the cleansing experience of a stable, middle-class, college-educated woman from Short Hills or even West Orange. He became the escape artist he identified in this contradictory phrase: “I always seem to need to be emancipated from whatever has liberated me,” while also craving order and domesticity. This is the Roth problem. 

But the “Roth problem” was never just Roth’s alone, as his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, was also to discover. At first, the problem seemed to be only between Roth and Bloom’s daughter Anna, who was sixteen at the time her mother and Roth first became a couple, in 1976. Although initially Roth and Anna got along just fine – they shared a similar sense of humor, and he was encouraging about her budding career as a singer – Roth’s relationship with both Anna and Claire began to deteriorate when he became jealous of the very close bond between mother and daughter. Their problems compounded when Claire, who had a flat in London, found she didn’t know what to do with herself up in Roth’s country house in Warren, CT., and felt she was neglecting Anna, who was living with Bloom’s mother in London while attending the Guildhall Music School. Roth proposed he and Claire split their time between London and the US (he also had an apartment in New York City) – but, as Bloom writes in her memoir Leaving a Doll’s House (1996),

…he made it clear that he had no intention of living together in the same house as my daughter. This mixture of kindness and cruelty, this coupling of generosity and selfishness, made me frantic with confusion.

In the event, Roth relented in his determination to ban Anna from either home – though this hardly brought an end to the Roth problem, which showed an uglier aspect in 1981, when Anna was 21. (This account is given in Bailey’s biography; for some reason, Nadel doesn’t mention it.) Anna and her friend “Felicity” (a pseudonym) were staying at the flat in London when Roth, in the absence of both Claire and Anna, tried to French-kiss Felicity. Roth denied this to Bailey, while offering up a “bit of erotic trivia” (his words):

I for one have never found the “French kiss” pleasurable. To go searching around the cavern of a woman’s mouth with a jutting, insinuating tongue was never my idea of fun, not even as an adolescent and certainly not as a man, even one who willingly admits a profound fondness for cunnilingus.

Roth made another attempt on Felicity seven years later, in 1988, when she was again a guest in his home. According to what she told Anna, Felicity was coming down the stairs in her nightgown when Roth, who was “tipsy”, made a pass at her. Again she rebuffed him. The following morning, Roth greeted her breezily with the query, “Come on, how long is it since I made a pass at you? Ten years [sic]? What’s the point of having a pretty girl in the house if you don’t fuck her?” Roth denied saying this – but not the pass itself.

By that time, though, relations between Roth and Bloom had already further deteriorated. Roth had suffered a serious nervous crisis in the summer of 1987 — the result of depression and hallucinations brought on by his use of the sleep medication Halcion following knee surgery. (Roth suffered from leg, neck and back problems for most of his life.) Though Roth’s psychotic symptoms vanished after he went off Halcion, the problems between the couple remained, and indeed worsened, as Bloom recalls in her memoir:

The Trappist seclusion of our country life had become a threat to us both. As an outcome of Philip’s illness, the comfortably quiet life we had found so satisfying had turned into one of constraint; both of us were afraid of being alone together. 

In the fall of 1989, as Bailey recounts (I could find no mention of this in Nadel either), Roth gave Bloom the typescript of his novel Deception, in which a character named “Philip”, married to a “remarkably uninteresting, middle-aged wife” (Bloom’s words) named “Claire”, is having an affair with a younger woman. Bloom was understandably very upset – as was her stomach. (The vomit-stained manuscript now resides in the Roth archive at the Library of Congress.) To appease her, and at the suggestion of his friend Judith Thurman, Roth bought Bloom a gold, diamond and emerald serpent ring for $3,000 at Bulgari in New York, and agreed to remove her name from the novel. Bloom notes, “Then I accepted his guilt offering. I wear it to this day.”

The following year, despite all the problems in the relationship (and also, no doubt, because of them – a recurring theme in both biographies is that Roth needed struggle and opposition to fuel his writing), the couple married. (Reader, I married him.) But the worst was yet to come. In the summer of ’93, Roth experienced his second nervous crisis – an onset of depression and anxiety much worse than the one in ’89. He committed himself twice over the summer to Silver Hill Hospital, where he repeatedly confronted Bloom when she came to see him, accusing her of being unsympathetic and unsupportive. At one point, Bloom became so upset that she had to be sedated, and ended up spending the night in the hospital herself. By the time Roth was finally released in October, Bloom had been served with divorce papers, and Roth was back at work on Sabbath’s Theater – his favorite of all his novels. What was to be, arguably, his greatest body of work – the “American Trilogy” (American Pastoral [1997], I Married a Communist [1998], and The Human Stain [2000]) – was still before him. It is in the discussion of these major works, and the five short novels that concluded Roth’s career, that Nadel’s biography proves most useful and insightful.

When New Yorker editor David Remnick asked him in a 2000 interview when he was happiest (tough question!), Roth replied, without hesitation, that it was when he was writing Sabbath. Why? “Because I felt free. I feel [sic] like I am in charge now.” Roth’s friend Claudia Roth Pierpont (no relation) confirms this impression in her excellent study-cum-memoir Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books (2013), and connects it to certain innovations in style:

Roth’s own language takes on a new richness and beauty in Sabbath’s Theater, a development that he attributes to the unprecedented freedom that he felt in writing it – “the freest experience of my life”…. The prose, cast in a deeply subjective third person, moves seamlessly in and out of Sabbath’s thoughts, revving up to gale force while maintaining the confiding ease that Roth had long ago perfected…. He distrusts extended description…and seems ever wary of the risks of pretentiousness or of diffusing the pressure of the voice. Even here, a note of lyric gorgeousness is apt to end with a blackened eye….

The distinguished critic Harold Bloom, cited in Bernard Avishai’s Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness (2012), described Sabbath’s Theater as Portnoy’s Complaint in its tragic mode. And Nadel’s own précis of the storyline is too good to pass up: “The novel charts the unsubtle priapic life of a Rabelaisian puppeteer who after years with an uninhibited sexually driven mistress who has just died must adjust to a world unaccustomed to his behavior.” That “uninhibited sexually driven mistress” (surely an understatement) is Drenka Balich, one of Roth’s most vivid and unforgettable creations, who makes Portnoy’s “Monkey” look positively prim and proper. The original of Drenka, Nadel informs us, was Roth’s married Connecticut physiotherapist Maletta Pfeiffer, mother of four, with whom he carried on an affair from “roughly 1978 to 1994” – nearly the entire duration of his relationship with Bloom. Bailey’s description of certain aspects of their affair — absent, alas, from Nadel’s account — must be quoted in full (Bailey gives her the pseudonym “Inga”):

She pretended to be pleased when he’d press on her a semen-encrusted napkin or some such fetish, and she became more and more adept at looking entranced whenever he’d suddenly, a propos de rien, begin masturbating in front of her…. During his London years [with Claire Bloom], Roth would call Inga long-distance and expect her to listen while he masturbated…. “Here I am,” Inga remembered, “and here’s this guy on the line and I have patients and the doctors around and he wants me to listen. And then as soon as he has come, ejaculated, he bangs the receiver and that’s it…. And then sometimes he calls back and there’s a conversation: ‘How are you?'”

It may seem odd at first glance to call the perpetrator of such actions “an American romantic”, but Nadel makes an excellent case for this designation, and his discussions of Sabbath’s Theater, the American Trilogy, and the last five novellas are especially strong. (Nadel is at his best as a critic of Roth’s work, and consistently outdistances Bailey in this regard.) Wrapped in an American flag and standing on the seashore near the end of the novel, Mickey Sabbath 

is a mournful patriot, conscious of both a dark past and an uncertain future. An American flag may fly over the U.S. postal station in Old Rimrock, but it is quickly ripped apart by a bomb in American Pastoral. Years after that book’s publication, as a sign of atonement as well as solidarity, Roth hung a large American flag in the window of his New York apartment after the attacks of 9/11. 

Nadel notes the emergence, in the American Trilogy, of “an American aesthetic, the need to record everything” – in Roth’s own words, “to discover the most arresting evocative verbal depiction for every last American thing.” Nadel goes on: “Roth persisted in searching for an American identity that transcended politics and bias. As an American, he gestured toward an earlier, nostalgic time….” Taylor quotes Roth on the legacy of American literary heartbreak, in which he includes himself: “Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, James, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner, Bellow, they’re heartbroken patriots. Looking back now, I see it’s what I’ve been too.” And Taylor himself is very good on Roth’s place in the canon of American literary self-mythology: 

Like Salinger, like Frost, like Hemingway, Philip generated a carapace that became a myth. In Frost’s case, it was the farmer poet. In Hemingway’s, the sportsman artist. In Salinger’s, the wrathful recluse determined to give his readers nothing more. In Philip’s case, the Jewish good boy traduced by inner anarchy.

This “Jewish good boy”, let us not forget, was from New Jersey; and it is in Nadel’s extended discussion of what he calls “the Jersey style” that his talents as a critic are at their finest.

Nadel derives the term “Jersey style” from an illuminating description by the writer and Paris Review editor George Plimpton (a friend of Roth’s) in a 2003 interview:

The mob, great prizefighters, the prisons, the world of Far Hills, the gamblers, the shore, the corridor between Philadelphia and New York – there is this extraordinary framework that the state’s writers have had throughout American history.

Nadel helpfully narrows the focus a little, makes it more strictly literary, and applies the “Jersey style” specifically to Roth’s own art. (Nadel’s point here deserves extended citation.)

Plain-speaking transparent writing focusing on the mundane might summarize the Jersey style seen in the abbreviated, direct language of…Swede Levov’s father in American Pastoral lamenting in vivid but simple language the ruin of Newark…a direct, unembellished, modulated, reportorial language. The sentences are clipped and the rhetoric scaled down. The origin of this style was partly the world of Roth’s father, who offered [quoting Roth’s words in The Facts] “something coarser” than literary talk, teaching his son “the vernacular”…. This “point-blank” style was the language of the street, the apartment, the schoolyard, the hangouts, the office, the garage, and the store, straight language that nevertheless incorporated Jersey symbols: the working class, the industrial skyline, the shore.

Nadel then makes a most interesting, original and thought-provoking observation (which again bears quoting in full):

Roth stopped writing fiction in 2010 not because he had no more to say but because he had exhausted his language. The Jersey style had erased the need for flamboyance, lyricism, or high-octane writing and curtailed his storytelling. After the recovery of his Jersey style [which first appeared in his earliest published stories] there was no need for anything more.

Nadel is also good on the painters that Roth knew and admired, and the role they played in inspiring certain aspects of his art. He met and became friends with Philip Guston when he was living in Woodstock, after the publication of Portnoy. Indeed, what appealed to Roth in Guston’s work suggests what Roth himself had achieved in the writing of Portnoy, and would become his hallmark in all of the other works after that breakthrough novel. “What Roth truly admired in Guston,” Nadel writes, “was his sense of, and enactment of, the subversive…. To Roth, Guston became an example of fecundity unleashed when one rejects the formal and abstract.” In the work of R.B. Kitaj, an American-born, London-based painter, Roth found subjects that resonated with him: “exile, isolation and the Holocaust, summarized in the concept of the diaspora, the very subject of Kitaj’s First Diasporist Manifesto (1989), which Roth incorporates but alters in Operation Shylock….” Kitaj also had a strong influence on the content of Sabbath’s Theater. Nadel quotes Kitaj scholar Marco Livingstone, who claims that the novel “grew directly out of Kitaj’s experiences, specifically the loss of Sandra [Kitaj’s wife], and even incorporated almost verbatim transcripts of the conversations Roth and Kitaj held over the telephone.” As Nadel reports, “Livingstone writes that Roth used some of what [Kitaj] said about his time at sea for Mickey Sabbath and some of what he said about Sandra’s death,” and that “Mickey Sabbath is a ‘thinly disguised transformation of the artist.'” 

Though Roth achieved fame, fortune and critical distinction as a novelist, and passed most of his life at his writing desk (either sitting or standing, because of his bad back), he also spent a significant amount of time as a college and university teacher – at Chicago, at the famous Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and then at Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Hunter and Bard Colleges. Teaching was a job he took seriously, and by most reports he was very good at it. Nadel writes: 

Reminiscences by several of his students, mostly from Penn, emphasize Roth’s humor, generosity and high standards…. His teaching was text-specific, asking students about a scene, character, or line of dialogue. Never was he condescending, although they were warned not to bring up his own work or his personal life.

By his own account, Roth was an “ace festooner” of student papers, covering them with comments and corrections: 

It is not in my nature, neither [sic!] as a teacher or as a friend, lover, or enemy, to let pass the tiniest grammatical error or the largest intellectual gaffe without my saying something about it.

Bailey then notes, “One student remarked that he’d never received so many scribbled rebukes in his life.” It may come as yet another surprise that, in the early 1970s, “unlike other seminar professors who were on a first-name basis ‘in those let-it-all-hang-out days’ [Roth’s own words], he asked that they call him Mr. Roth, and addressed them in kind….” One former student wrote to Bailey that Roth was her “best professor not only because of his genius, but also because of his distance.”

He wasn’t always so distant, though. Nadel tells us that “Roth…did pursue his students, and not always Platonically. Throughout his teaching, he found the classroom an almost unending source of young and often willing females….” Again, Bailey gives us much more detail. Roth’s friend Joel Conarroe, who was chair of the English Department at Penn when Roth taught there in the early 70s, essentially acted as his pimp, vetting female students for his classes on the basis of their looks. “We gave the illusion of being utterly democratic in choosing your students,” Conarroe smirked in a 1971 letter to Roth, “but in fact picked the same ones any totalitarian dictator would have picked.” O tempora, o mores…. This sort of thing may have passed in 1971, but certainly wouldn’t these days, and would doubtless result in the summary firing of both conniving colleagues. To Bailey, Roth justified his practice by remarking that he “considered sex one of the most desirable aspects of teaching ‘back in the days’ – as he later put it – ‘when you weren’t hauled off in chains to feminist prison if you struck up a tender friendship with the smartest, most beautiful girl in your class.'” Roth remembered, of one student, “I was 40 and she was 19. Perfect. As God meant it to be.” Well, the Lord may work in mysterious ways, but one man’s “tender friendship” is another woman’s sexual predation. On the other hand, Nadel relates the story of a Penn student whom Roth visited in the hospital when she had a nervous breakdown, and with whom he later had an active correspondence, commenting, “Throughout, Roth showed patience and empathy.” (Though one does wonder about possible ulterior motives.)

On a less Lotharian level, Nadel is excellent on the Newark background, providing many details on life in the city during Roth’s childhood and adolescence, such as gangsters, prizefighters, movie theaters, bagel joints and luncheonettes (prices included). We get a delightfully succinct description of the range of Herman Roth’s conversation (captured more extensively in Roth’s own memoir of his father, Patrimony): “Newark, Newark, Newark; family, family, family; Jew, Jew, Jew” — which gives us a good idea of why the son had to get out of the place as soon as he could (and also why he remained so attached to it the rest of his life). Nadel neatly points out

…the paradox at the center of his work: his escape from Newark ironically pulled him back to the city and his family in his writing. But he felt the strain as having more to do with saving and rescuing rather than advancing and eliminating.

But Nadel’s command of his material — and of his writing — is not always so felicitous. As mentioned earlier, his use of psychoanalytic terms and concepts is sometimes strained, as in this passage from the Preface, which attempts to link Roth’s style to a defense against failure and betrayal: 

Roth’s energetic expressive style, piling phrases upon phrases [clearly Nadel is not talking here about the “Jersey style”, which he so brilliantly explicates later in the book], may be his defense against such a betrayal (or failure), his strategy to overcome the possible disloyalty of individual words.

This is mere silliness – as is this: “In his eighties, rejected again for the Nobel Prize (won by Bob Dylan in 2016), he encountered failing health and finally death: life itself betrayed him.” (On the touchy subject of that 2016 Nobel for Literature, by the way, Nadel informs us that “…Roth reportedly said, ‘No, it’s not bad, it’s fun. I’ve just been inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.”) 

In his handling of Roth’s humor, Nadel sometimes seems tone-deaf to its blacker sounds. One example is the passage in Portnoy where the character Ronald Nimkin, just before he commits suicide by hanging, pins a note to his mother on his freshly-ironed sport shirt: “Mrs. Blumenthal called. Please bring your mah-jongg rules to the game tonight.” Portnoy comments, “Now how’s that for good to the last drop?” Nadel calls this comment “cynical” — but wouldn’t “ironic” come closer to the tone and sense here, especially considering the deliberate echo of the old Maxwell House commercial? He also seems to miss the black humor when relating the story of Zuckerman’s mother, Selma, in The Anatomy Lesson, who, when hospitalized with a brain tumor and asked by the doctor to write her name, writes “Holocaust”. And referring to the very ending of Sabbath’s Theater, after Sabbath has decided not to commit suicide after all (“How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here”), Nadel comments, unnecessarily and heavy-handedly, “To end hate is to end life.” Considering these comedic lapses, it comes as a relief when Nadel sees fit to pass on a great joke of Roth’s. Relating the aboriginal inhabitants of New Jersey, the Lenape, to a later group of immigrants, Roth quipped that the name “Newark” derived “from an old Lenape word meaning ‘Is it good for the Jews?'”

Unlike the always fluent (though less scholarly) Bailey, Nadel is sometimes a hapless writer. His prose tends to be a bit plodding, and he has an unfortunate (and frequent) predilection for absolute participial phrases – a tendency that produces all too many sentences like the following: “But the adulatory interview of the celebrities could not avoid a remark on Roth’s ‘fealty’ to his work, having just published The Anatomy Lesson and underway on a new book.” (The last phrase is not only an absolute, but also dangles; it’s intended to refer to Roth, but actually refers to the interview.) I marked 19 of these clunky absolute phrases (and I only started counting on p. 224), and also 38 grammatical errors. It should be noted here, too, that Nadel gets little help from the editorial staff at Oxford University Press, who have apparently missed not only the grammatical errors, but also some misspellings of names, and inaccurate titles. 

To answer the question posed at the very beginning of this review – no, a biographer doesn’t necessarily have to be all that sympathetic to their subject, as long as, in their presentation of all the relevant material, they make us see (and, even more, feel) why the subject is important for us to understand. It’s a pity that in Nadel’s presentation there are all these technical glitches, because in its critical substance — scholarship and literary insight – it’s really a better book, a more understanding book, than Bailey’s. But due to the recent rash of publicity concerning Bailey’s own sexual life – basically, that he reportedly groomed a number of his female students when he taught middle-school in New Orleans, and later allegedly raped a couple of them — Nadel’s book seems to have been mostly ignored by the reviewers. This too is a shame. The two biographies certainly have their different strengths. As the authorized biographer, Bailey had privileged access to Roth’s personal papers that was denied to Nadel, and also was able to interview many more people than Nadel; so as far as covering the details of Roth’s life, the Bailey biography is clearly superior. But the larger importance of Roth as a writer, which is lost (or worse, never even fully addressed) amid all of Bailey’s biographical details (colorful as they are), is nicely recovered by Nadel. In both books, however, the bigger picture of Roth’s life and work, taken together, and their significance for American literary history, don’t yet come clear, and probably won’t for quite some time – at least not until we gain the longer historical perspective by which to rightly evaluate his overall literary achievement. When that time comes, I suspect Roth will appear to better advantage in the pantheon, alongside Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Bellow, as one of the most important and innovative American novelists of the 20th Century – if not (in my judgment) the greatest.

Josh Gidding is the author of Failure: An Autobiography (2007), and has published a number of personal essays in literary journals. His essay “On Not Being Proust: An Essay in Literary Failure” was listed in Best American Essays 2009.  He has taught at USC, Holy Cross, Dowling College and Stony Brook University, and currently teaches at Highline College near Seattle, WA.