The Lives of Philip Roth

We will never know how Roth would have reviewed this biography of Roth, the masked novelist who wanted to disguise himself as an autobiographer in

and who always needed to invent his own lives and confuse them with those lives of others that his profession led him to conceive in the form of characters, playing at blurring the boundaries that separate the creator from his creatures, entangling the skein of identities.

In the famous interview with

the author of

made it clear that “the idea is to turn flesh and blood people into fictional characters and fictional characters into flesh and blood people.

[…] A writer is an actor.

There has to be some pleasure in this job, and this is it, going around in disguise.

Act like a character.

Pretend to be what you are not.

Pretend".

And his readers know well that he perverted fragments of his life by disseminating them among his characters, heteronyms or

, to the point that it makes a lot of sense to wonder, as he did in the interview with

: “Am I Lonoff?

Am I Zuckerman?

Am I Portnoy?

Am I Kepesh?

At the moment I am nothing as sharply outlined as a character in a book.

I'm still the amorphous Roth”, but let's agree that “we are continually writing fictional versions of our lives”.

It is easy to presume that Bailey, the scrupulous professional biographer who previously dealt with John Cheever or Richard Yates, has made a tour de force of his embarrassing commitment to recount the life of a writer as obsessed with inventing existence as Roth, given the challenge of mapping the life of a polyhedral man, with a fickle personality, controversial as well as concerned, who fed on mystification and debated between the concupiscence of the body and the transcendence of the mind and between

and the

He was a champion of American Jewish narrative along with his teachers Malamud and Singer, his admired Bellow, his nemesis Updike and a Norman Mailer whom he turns into a marginal character in his novel

, in which he freely enjoys exercising a tortuously exacerbated conscience, practicing the splitting of personality and all sorts of forms and experiments of fictional schizophrenia, of the ambiguous refraction of personality and of the multiple identities that hang from one self like the pieces of a

Calder

And it is that he “was sick of distortion of myself […], of disguise of my own self”.

“I don't want you to rehabilitate my person.

Just make it interesting," the writer told Bailey.

Roth's lives are those of a handsome, burlesque, and prolific Jewish-American novelist who gave up the chimera of the ivory tower to live life, and who, concocting it in intricate fictional artifacts written with dedication and sacrifice, was soon able to feel triumphant.

Accused of being an anti-Semite because, unruly, he declared war against the cliché of Judaism, he faced, before the very gaze of Kafka, the thorny issue of the all-powerful politics facing the vulnerable individual, and lived, in equal parts, as a man of letters and like Don Juan

Bailey opts for the

, and for a conscientious work of collecting data and testimonies stringing them together in the form of a story, verifying without venturing, to the detriment of an interpretive biography.

It focuses on political issues and the human condition and the sociology of literature, leaving blurred those that are closest to artistic creation and literary debates, which the reader will find in the pages of

and other texts collected in

(1960-2013).

In short, who knows if this was the true life of Philip Roth, but let us recognize that the biography that Bailey has erected honors the enormous figure of the author of

and lines up next to Brian Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov.

that of Stephen B. Oates, William Faulkner.

or that of Paul Alexander,

.

There is not the slightest doubt about the merit of biography of a man who repeated

and in a thousand different ways in his work: "I don't have a self, but I do have a whole variety of imitations, and not only of my self, but also of others." a veritable throng of internalized performers.

I am a theater and nothing more than a theater” (

), and the fact is that their fictional selves do not usually show the best image of Roth, who does not care because, as someone has said, he does not believe that literature is a moral beauty contest.

And Bailey's strenuous work hoarding the details of Roth's plethoric and contrived life accounts for the frenetic and sophisticated author's well-known literature of unquestionable novels such as

and for the decision in 2010, as audacious as it was irrevocable, to proclaim to the four winds that he stopped writing, that the curtain lowered.

When Roth commissioned this authorized biography of Bailey, he said, “I don't want you to rehabilitate me.

Just make it interesting”, and Bailey, without the slightest hagiographical intent, but with undoubted detective intent, has turned Roth into the protagonist of a genuine naturalist novel.

Exhaustive and addictive, as it is from God.

look for it in your bookstore

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