Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey

Author:Blake Bailey [Bailey, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393240726
Google: diyzDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 039324072X
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2021-04-05T23:00:00+00:00

THE ANATOMY LESSON had given Roth fits, and its fairly brutal reception was even more demoralizing after he’d done his little-all to flog it. By publication day, in early November, he’d seen enough: “I’ll be glad to be getting out of here,” he wrote Tumin. “I don’t mind having to write the fucking books, but I’ll be God damned if I’m going to stand here being insulted.” One friend and steady reader had assured him that he liked The Anatomy Lesson, and when Roth heard that this same friend had belittled the book behind his back, he treated him to a particularly blistering phone call, then took a full three years to apologize: “Say whatever the hell you want to say about my books,” he finally wrote the man, “—it’s not Czechoslovakia.”

“Best of luck,” a well-wisher had remarked to Roth, “and I hope you get Michiko Kakutani instead of Chris Lehmann-Haupt.” Kakutani would go on to review many Roth books for The New York Times, but for now he was back in the hands of the reliably ambivalent Lehmann-Haupt, who began his review by applauding Roth’s “rich, satisfyingly complex conclusion to his Zuckerman trilogy” but was behooved, at last, to condemn the hero’s “endless self-absorption and scab-picking.” The latter view would prove all but unanimous. Zeroing in on the Howe/Appel subplot, Commentary enlisted a stalwart hit man, Joseph Epstein, to bash the novel as “a roman of clay. . . . A character who is having love affairs with four women and wishes to get his own back at a literary critic—this is not . . . exactly a figure of universal significance.” Even Updike, in The New Yorker, was unable to sustain a somewhat strained enthusiasm for Roth’s ever increasing “expertness” in handling “by now highly polished themes,” admitting that The Anatomy Lesson was “the least successful” of the trilogy: “Zuckerman’s babyish reduction of all women to mere suppliers eclipses much of Roth’s engaging characterization of the mistresses, who are each set before us never to appear again.” This, coming from Updike, had to hurt.

In The Anatomy Lesson, Roth described a phenomenon with which he would become even more intimately familiar in the years ahead: “The job was to give pain its due while at the same time rendering accurately the devastation it wreaks upon reason, dignity, pride, maturity, independence—upon all of one’s human credentials.” That Zuckerman supports his aching neck with a thesaurus his father gave him as a boy (“From Dad—you have my every confidence”) would suggest the pain is “felt at a distance from its source,” as the book’s epigraph from the Textbook of Orthopedic Medicine would have it, and never mind the hero’s impotence as a writer ever since his father, on his deathbed, called him a bastard. But then, such an explanation is too pat for a writer of Zuckerman’s subtlety, and he wonders whether he’s actually being tortured by the terrible, life-denying requirements of his vocation per se. Martin Amis’s quip about Roth’s

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