(np) Forward review of Bailey/Roth

[Mark Kohut]

Norton's decision was cowardly, ass-protecting....a mob of scribbling
readers, literati and writers went after them, said they should have
handled the charges differently two years ago and made real and overt
threats about
the books they would never bring them...It must have been a
horror.....still too much rhetoric from James but 'most commentators
declaring a victory' seems right enough but they just might have stopped
declaring anything instead.
Nadel doesn't have enough.....Wolcott wants to be so contrarian, ending
with a recommendation for* My Life as a Man*, maybe his first fuller
masterpiece, (but I still love *When She Was Good* best first; Roth caught
America's fundamentalist self-justification
in this one, the same fundamentalist self-justification that now splays
over 4-5 seats in our Supreme Court ).* My Life as a Man* does still rip
because Roth was ripped when writing it, but c'mon, compared to some later
books, this one is minor.

On Mon, May 31, 2021 at 5:06 PM Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Last paragraph of Wolcott, in case somebody didn't make it so far:
>
> As for his disgraced Boswell, Blake Bailey, his life, career, reputation
> and name have been rat-holed at record speed. He and his story will serve
> as a case study for some future literary autopsist. I opposed the campaign
> to cancel further printings of *Philip Roth: The Biography* on the
> democratic principle that if I was able to buy and read the book, which has
> substantial merits despite its disfigurement, it’s only fair that everybody
> else is; that’s now moot, at least in the US. Norton’s decision to
> permanently deep-six The Biography and make a sizeable donation to sexual
> abuse organisations was declared a victory by most commentators and decried
> by a smaller number as Woke Capitalism caving to the social justice mob, a
> culture clash that will keep the hearties of the opinion pages,
> Twitterverse and Substack Nation busy sharpening their certitudes for the
> next volley of javelin throws. Unscathed and unmucked is the perfectly fine
> Life of Roth sitting in plain view minding its own business with no stink
> attached – Ira Nadel’s. It would be a tasty irony if the also-ran emerged
> as the upset winner after all. It would be the only light note in this
> whole misbegotten *mishegas*. But if, as an educated consumer, you’re
> disinclined to read another word about Philip Roth, or another word by
> Philip Roth, I’d say only this: give* My Life as a Man* a try. It still
> rips.
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>