Philip roth

Tuesday

David Profumo

‘I am haunted by waters’: Norman Maclean and his lyrical ‘little blue book’

Although in his later years Norman Maclean was renowned for his nuanced and often lyrical autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It (subsequently filmed by Robert Redford, and known in angling circles – with mixed feelings – simply as ‘The Movie’), by all accounts he could be forbidding and ornery in person. He informed one Hollywood shyster: ‘When we had bastards like you out west we shot them for coyote bait.’ The novelist Pete Dexter once described him as ‘an old man who obviously takes no prisoners, looking at you as if you’d just invented rock’n’ roll’ – and that was only from a photograph. There are indeed some moody

Monday

Joel Diggory

Don’t cancel Philip Roth

Philip Roth is the Hugh Hefner of the American novel: he is the playboy of fiction; he has built a house of pleasure. But now, according to some, it is time to demolish that house.  A new biography of Roth is about to come out, and some of the details in it are the ammo that Roth’s critics have been waiting for: they have been pounced on as proof that he is a ‘misogynist’ and that there should be no place for him in the era of MeToo. So what is Roth said to have done, according to Blake Bailey’s new authorised biography? Bailey describes Roth getting bored with his English

Thursday

James Walton

Michaela Coel’s dazzling finale reminds me of Philip Roth: I May Destroy You reviewed

It might seem a bit of a stretch to see deep similarities between Michaela Coel (young, female, black and currently very fashionable indeed) and the late Philip Roth (increasingly discredited as an embodiment of all those phallocentric white guys who once ruled American fiction merely because they were great writers). Nonetheless, this week’s television made it hard not to. On Tuesday night, as an adaptation of Roth’s The Plot Against America began on Sky Atlantic, Coel’s I May Destroy You was serving up a dazzling final episode that confirmed how Rothian the series has been. For one thing, the main character Arabella, played by Coel herself, was — like many