Philip Roth’s carnival of desire The flawed writer is an antidote to today's less ambitious literary scene

Faced with this career-long carnival of unruly desire, it sounds bizarre to switch attention from gender politics to geopolitics — the sort of soporific stunt pulled by the blockhead professors he loved to guy. Even sex, though, takes place in time. Yet Bailey’s supremely readable chronicle opens out into the world beyond the bedroom arenas where Roth’s gladiatorial couplings unfold. As Bailey suggests, Roth and his male literary peers came to maturity in a post-Second World War United States coming to terms with its role as a consumer cornucopia at home and global superpower abroad. Born in 1933, in the darkest hour of the Depression, he grew up in the belly of a strong young beast. America’s new hegemony showered at least some of its citizens with unimagined goodies, and bestrode the Cold War stage like an adolescent colossus. He and his high-achieving coevals were children of the long boom that saw US GDP soar from $243 billion in 1947 to $2.8 trillion in 1980.

The fruits of plenty were unevenly spread. But this age of gold shone on striving millions – many, like Roth, the offspring of fairly recent immigrant families — as median household incomes rose (in real, inflation-adjusted terms) from $34,710 in 1954 to $62,153 in 1973. Despite the Vietnam imbroglio, racial unrest in the cities and youth revolt, US unemployment dropped to a historic low of 3.4 per cent just as Roth published Portnoy in 1969. The suburban plenty whose seamy side Roth unpicked reflected in miniature the zenith of US affluence and authority. If you want to understand why a serious literary novelist (albeit one with a satirical, scurrilous side) could hit such peaks of fame, look at the annual figures for the award of US first degrees. They shot up from 136,000 in 1945 to 1,094,000 in 1990, with a hike from 520,000 t0 840,000 between 1965 and 1970 alone.

Wealthier, better educated, better informed — as seriously written city and regional newspapers still competed with the TV networks — this new mass public amplified Roth’s voice, and his glory. The paperback of Portnoy sold 3.5 million within five years.

At least until his late-career reflorescence, Roth was aware that he stuck to the narrow patch he knew. “I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole,” he said. Reading Bailey, though, you grasp that this seemingly narrow shaft — Newark, Jewish suburbia, upward mobility, male sexual hubris and nemesis, American success and its discontents, time, age and mortality — contains not just of bedrooms, but boardrooms and war-rooms. In 1997, the masterly American Pastoral marked Roth’s second coming as a full-fledged historical novelist of epic, not just domestic, scope. Its narrator, Roth’s regular alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, reflects that the tragic hero “Swede” Levov must have been “baffled” by the question: “How had he become history’s plaything”. Even as they yearn, strive and plot, with the next lay, the next game, the next raise in view, Roth’s heroes remain history’s playthings.

He thought of calling the great turn-of the-21st-century trilogy that began with American Pastoral and continued with I Married a Communist and The Human Stain “Blindsided”. Its aghast protagonists find themselves ambushed and felled by unforeseen outcomes of the postwar American Dream of prosperity, progress and self-realisation. As early as his baseball fable The Great American Novel in 1973, Roth understood that he was telling mythic stories about the rise and fall of a superpower — not just the ups and downs of little guys. Baseball might serve, he said, as “a means to dramatise the struggle between the benign national myth of itself that a great power prefers to perpetuate, and the relentlessly insidious, very nearly demonic reality”.

For writers, birth dates matter. Always in Roth’s sight lay the just-senior writers who had experienced the Second World War as young adults: Norman Mailer who served in the Pacific; Gore Vidal, a naval officer; Roth’s idol Saul Bellow, a Merchant Marine volunteer; or Joseph Heller, a B-25 bombardier. In contrast, he and 1930s-born contemporaries such as John Updike and Don DeLillo were (Bailey argues) “abstemious children of the Depression”. They eschewed grand gestures, “kept their noses to the grindstone”, and maximised their productivity. Not every one of these Depression wunderkinder stood an equal chance. Toni Morrison, born in 1931, only published her first novel in 1970 — however, her job as a New York fiction editor had to a degree lowered the formidable obstacles arising from her race and sex.

Roth was a compartmentaliser. His proneness to excess applied strictly in the bedroom. In a taste-defying metaphor, he compared the male sexual adventurers of the early Sixties to the GIs who vanquished Nazism: “I sometimes think of my generation of men as the first wave of determined D-Day invaders, over whose bloody, wounded carcasses the flower children subsequently stepped ashore”. With sex, Roth went over the top. Otherwise, he maintained his work-rate at a punishingly high level, like any harassed postwar corporate executive. Friends and lovers comment on his “monkish habits”, especially after he bought (cash down, $110,000) a farmhouse in Warren, Connecticut and shut himself away — girlfriends excepted — for seasons on end. He dubbed it “The Fiction Factory”.

From their fiction factories, Roth and his Depression-born buddies delivered the goods: year after year, book after book, high-minded rivals to the suited stiffs at IBM, Standard Oil or Chrysler. (Roth, with his 31 volumes, even envied Updike his “fucking fluency”.) The kid from Newark, whose adored father Herman had served the Metropolitan Life insurance company for 36 years, adhered to a thoroughly bourgeois model of hard graft. His progress traces an all-American postwar gradient of social mobility, professional attainment, career milestones and late-life plaudits. “We’re hicks,” Roth said of his group, “It’s just because we’re such hicks that we’ve all become so sophisticated.” Ascent meant vindication, too. In Herman Roth’s day, Bailey reveals, a Jew could not hope to advance beyond branch manager at Met Life.

His son Philip rose along with Mad Men America, in an age of aspiration, reward and newly-bestowed entitlement – an entitlement that Roth drew on in the currency of sex. The money came in handy, too. His advances and fees soon skyrocketed. In 1968, Roth reckoned his income as $827,000 — more than $6 million today. Slacker times (relatively) ensued, but by 1989 his new agent Andrew Wylie could strike a three-book deal with Simon & Schuster for $1.8 million. In the heyday of corporate America, this was high literature as big business. Roth gave much of the dosh away: charitably, to exes, girlfriends, chums, or family; and, commercially, to the myriad doctors and hospitals who treated his chronic back pain and worsening heart conditions. That he could earn it in the first place shows how America’s postwar high tide lifted even the toughest, rudest critic of the puritan and philistine mainstream.

But all good things — and bad things — come to end. (After an 80th birthday gala hosted by Edna O’Brien, Roth wrote that “the meaning of life is that it stops”.) Decline, private and public, shadows his later fiction, often given burnt-out, strife-torn form in the recession-wrecked city of Newark. And with that geopolitical fall came the discredit and opprobrium that now attached to the kind of cocksure strutting that Roth the man (not Roth the novelist) had sometimes indulged. Shame once more dogged his heels, above all after Claire Bloom published her damning memoir Leaving a Doll’s House. One TV show, unimprovably, dubbed it “her thermonuclear dish-all”. Bailey draws on Roth’s unpublished “295-page rebuttal” of her accusations. Yes, 295-page.

Roth might deplore “this media eagerness to find culpability in matters large and small”. But it wasn’t just personal. The toppling of alpha male entitlement, literary and otherwise, partnered the eclipse of the alpha superpower as Cold War “victory” failed to stop the rot. Not for nothing did Roth call one of his final, frail novellas The Humbling. At least his gifts remained undimmed when it came to fantasy solutions for the American fix that wore a MAGA cap. In 2004, he spookily modelled the lure of Trumpish populism in the historical dystopia of The Plot Against America. When the real thing came along, he called the orange one a “massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac”. Even Nixon got off lighter.

In recent times, the reputation of Roth, Mailer, Updike et al has come to resemble a sort of crumbling rustbelt in itself. Their more modest American (and British) successors tend to play nicely, move in packs and — above all — stay in their appointed lanes. The upshot is a more wholesome if less ambitious literary scene — more Brooklyn artisan bakery than some flaming, roaring, polluting steel plant in Pennsylvania (or New Jersey). Bailey’s mammoth testament may, or may not, push the graph of Roth stock up a little. In any case, his biography shows that it took, not a village, but a clumsily confident behemoth of a victorious nation, to raise these wayward, favoured children. These flawed literary giants could grow so tall because a one-off confluence of historical forces nourished them. Their empire has now toppled. How are China’s best-known novelists behaving in private? We might soon need to know.

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Boyd Tonkin is a journalist, editor, and literary and music critic, and author recently of The 100 Best Novels in Translation.

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