He fumed endlessly about his first wife, Maggie Martinson, who trapped him by using another woman’s urine to deliver a positive pregnancy test. His two marriages were disastrous, in no small part thanks to his epic philandering. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he scandalized the Jewish American community he grew up in with his 1959 story collection “Goodbye, Columbus.” With his sexually irreverent 1969 novel “Portnoy’s Complaint,” he scandalized everybody else. The arc of Roth’s life is American literary folklore now. It’s a well-researched and engrossing book, but at times a frustratingly narrow one, despite its heft. When Philip Roth began his literary career in the 1950s, he started at the University of Chicago, where he said his ambitions were simple: “bibliography by day, women by night.” That’s something of a blunt organizing principle for Blake Bailey’s hotly-anticipated biography, "Philip Roth" (Norton, 912 pp., ★★★ out of four). Duckworth on resilience, fear, and being 'at peace' in new memoir
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |