Review: Remembering Roth

Remembering Roth by James Atlas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I never got to meet Philip Roth. I never even got to see him read from a distance. I did read him, extensively, and I did get to write and lecture a fair bit about him. (Shameless plug: my summative lecture on his career is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqZf7... ) I was demographically like a lot of his younger friends – that is, like Adam Gopnik and James Atlas, I’m a Jewish writer (Atlas even went to my cousins’ high school – but somehow I never got the chance to hang out with him.

I still regret that, but I’m grateful to Atlas for giving me a sense of what I missed.

Above all, there’s confirmation of what I’ve heard often before: Roth was, in person, one of the most charming and magnetic personalities you can imagine. He enjoyed Atlas’s early biography of Delmore Schwartz, wrote Atlas to tell him, and the two became friends.

This isn’t long at all – it’s an extended essay as much as an almost-book – but it’s rich in detail about Roth’s humor, in both its good and ill dimensions.

My favorite amusing anecdote is from the time Atlas saw Roth sitting to talk with Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez. When Roth asked Hernandez how he was able to play so well on the field, Hernandez said, “It’s mental.” When Hernandez asked Roth how he was able to write so well, he answered, “It’s physical.”

Another winner comes when Roth asks Atlas to join him in the country with the “rich and famous.” “But I’m neither of those,” Atlas replies. “I know,” says Roth, “but they hate you as it you were.”

There are many others, though, and Atlas does a fine job of not overdoing their shared cleverness. It’s two men who enjoyed talking with another.

And then, in ways also famously characteristic of Roth, it isn’t. Atlas can’t put his finger on what soured their friendship. It may have been Atlas’s perhaps too aggressive biography of Saul Bellow, and it might just have been Roth aging into irascibility, but they stopped being as close.

This part of the memoir works just as well as the beginning. It shows the two continuing their friendship but in strained fashion. In a poignant moment, Roth writes him as “James” rather than as “Jim,” and Atlas sighs at the implication of estrangement.

In the end, Atlas is sad to think he’s not one of the thirty friends gathered around Roth’s bedside at his death – thirty being a very large number for a man who claimed so often to be alone, and a number large enough for Atlas to think he might have been part of it.

Atlas tells us he was in the running to write Roth’s biography, and I’m confident he’d have done a good job. What we have here, though, is something else. It may be slighter than a full biography, but it seems more personal than any biography could have been. It’s the account of a strong writer coming to terms with what it meant to be friends with one of the great voices of our time.


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