The Gripes of Roth

What a great woke irony! Philip Roth’s biographer is now being pilloried and pulped for his alleged sexual peccadillos, not the notorious womanizer and author of Portnoy’s Complaint himself. What’s wrong with the trophy-seeking feminist furies: can’t they see the bigger target when it’s in plain sight? Roth had over fifty years a triple career as famous novelist, notorious womanizer and political activist. He couldn’t untangle the three and neither can we nor the latest the book-burning critics.

Philip Roth is best known for novels like Portnoy’s Complaint flaunting the transgressions of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. In a different mood in later life he wrote a group of socio-political novels called The American Trilogy. They cover the turbulent decades from the 1940s to the 1980s, but also operate as a disguised autobiographical reflection mediated through his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. These novels present a different and more accurate account of Roth’s…