MASCULINE FRAGILITY & THE CANCEL CULTURE

I hesitated when asked if I would review Blake Bailey’s 900-page authorised biography of Philip Roth. The biography had already been published and reviewed in the US and was about to go on sale in New Zealand. Cynthia Ozick, one of my literary heroes, had declared Philip Roth: The Biography “a narrative masterwork”.

David Remnick, the New Yorker editor and a personal friend of Roth, wrote that “the man who emerges [from Bailey’s biography] is a literary genius, constantly getting it wrong, loving others then hurting them, wrestling with himself and with language, devoted to an almost unfathomable degree to the art of fiction”.

And then Bailey, who was a teacher before becoming a biographer, was accused of sexual coercion and rape by several women. As the accusations piled up, his US publisher, WW Norton, withdrew the book from shelves and cancelled it.

Setting aside its author for a moment, what did I have to add to these tributes for a book that microscopically examined Roth’s turbulent personal life as well as his formidable literary achievements, including 31 books, numerous Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards, the Presidential Medal of Honor, but never the Nobel Prize in Literature that he so expected and coveted?

While others read and re-read the paragraphs about Portnoy masturbating with a cow liver, I was aroused by the word onanism.

A lot, according to my friend, the writer Anne Landsman, with whom I would frequently argue about the merits of Roth’s place in the pantheon of great American writers. So I accepted the challenge.

Landsman admired Roth’s epic ambition, but would agree with the journalist and author Judith Shulevitz that “Roth was serially enraged at the women who came in and out of his life with very rapid turnover, and he represented many of their fictional counterparts as sexual playthings”.