Lives
Three years after his death, Philip Roth still haunts American letters. Over 900 pages, Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: the Biography ( Jonathan Cape) charts every rivalry, bust up, breakdown and affair. Disapproval of his official biographer’s indulgent attitude to Roth’s womanising —“you used to be able to sleep with the girls in the old days,” Roth told Saul Bellow, “and now of course it’s impossible. You go to feminist prison; you serve 20 years to life”—turned toxic when Bailey was accused of rape and his book withdrawn from sale in the US. UK readers can still make up their own minds.
By contrast, for Speak, Silence (Bloomsbury) Carole Angier was forbidden from investigating the family life of the German writer WG Sebald. Which is ironic since, as Angier reveals, Sebald’s own work liberally filched the stories of people he knew—with intriguing twists. Many of the models for his Jewish characters were, like Sebald, not Jewish themselves: their traumas personal, not world historical. Nonetheless, these acts of reverse cultural appropriation produced resonant fiction.