The Roth biography contains everything you’d ever want or need to know about Philip Roth, but it doesn’t contain his most crucial aspect: his writing.

(I couldn’t get through that one I do not dismiss or make light of allegations of wrongdoing, but someone whose entire premise consists of wondering if we should even read a biography or any work by an important and influential writer because of a person’s bad but probably not criminal behavior does, truly, seem like a troll.) Friends, what does my Rorschach read when I tell you that I was all of those people (except that last one)? Where is the semen, indeed. Were you a New Republic takedown type? Were you into that Harper’s hallucination where Philip Roth’s ghost (allegedly) reviewed his own biography? Perhaps you were in thrall to the angry Tablet story that asked, nay demanded, to know: “Where’s the Semen?” Or maybe you’re a disgusting bore and instead worried your chin with the anguished Sydney Morning Herald troll who was concerned that Philip Roth didn’t deserve to be read due to crimes against polite society, or whatever. I think as time goes on, the question of which piece of “Philip Roth: The Biography” coverage was your personal jam will become a Rorschach test of the kind of reader you are. My favorites so far are this terrific Magazine story by Mark Oppenheimer and Cynthia Ozick’s passionate review. I wound a tourniquet around my arm and injected each piece in and floated around in my high. I’ve read every single piece of ink ejaculated over the publication of Blake Bailey’s “Philip Roth: The Biography” I am Taffy Brodesser-Akner: The Obsessed. This is what biography is for.īut likewise, just when a writer’s biography comes out, it’s a good time to remember the writer’s actual books. A life can stretch out in front of you, but until it’s over, you don’t know how the beginning truly informed the end you won’t quite understand the poetry of the person’s story until its themes match up and you know exactly where and what the entire murky middle was. Probably you cannot accurately measure a writer - or any person - until the moment after his death.

Portnoy roth