Philip Roth — most meta of novelists, and most honest

On page 532 of my preview copy of this biography of Philip Roth there is a footnote. In it, Blake Bailey quotes from Roth’s novel Deception, where the character of Philip Roth asks his mistress what she would do if she was approached after his death by a biographer. Would she talk to him? She replies she might, if he was intelligent and serious. Bailey then adds, with self-deprecating wit: ‘Emma Smallwood did not respond to my request for an interview.’ Emma Smallwood is the name of one of Roth’s many lovers. It is not her real name.

OK, so: a fictionalised version of the subject of the biography I’m reviewing is quoted in words written by the subject of that biography, speaking about an imaginary biography to a fictionalised version of an unnamed woman. Her identity is then revealed, although with a fictional name, by the actual biographer, but only in her absence, in her refusal to say anything about the subject; which plays out — or doesn’t — the scenario the fictionalised Philip Roth was imagining when ‘he’ asked ‘her’ the question in the first place. It’s possibly the most meta footnote in the history of footnotes.

But then Roth was always the most meta of novelists. Philip Roth features as a character in six of his books, two of which (The Facts and Patrimony) are themselves biography. In nine other novels, the Philip Roth character is called Nathan Zuckerman. In four he is called Kepesh. In one (Operation Shylock) there are two Philip Roths. Many novelists debut with a roman-à-clef, and then leave their real life behind; but Roth’s whole oeuvre is a series of romans- à-clef. As he himself says in The Facts, his fiction is a process of ‘undermining experience, embellishing experience [and] rearranging and enlarging experience intoa species of mythology’.