Tablet Magazine

“Where’s the Semen?” Such was the provocative question headline posed by Jesse Tisch in this magazine’s review of the then-forthcoming Philip Roth: The Biography. The biographer in question was Blake Bailey, who had honed his writer-writing-about-writers skills by penning biographies of the writers Richard Yates, John Cheever, and Charles Jackson. Bailey had extensively interviewed Roth and had exclusive access to the Roth archives. The gargantuan 880-page biography that resulted seemed appropriate for a writer as prolific as Roth, who wrote 31 books over the course of his decades-long career. As rave reviews poured in, the biography seemed to provide a surprisingly demure finale to the life of a writer so often embroiled in controversy. As Tisch noted, when Roth staged his alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman’s funeral in his novel The Counterpart, one mourner complained about how sanitized the funeral was: “Here is a writer who broke taboos, fucked around, indiscreet, stepped outside that stuff deliberately, and they bury him like Neil Simon—Simonize our filthy, self-afflicted Zuck!”...

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