Philip Roth’s Coldhearted Betrayals

There is a fairly standard protocol governing the deaths of great novelists. First, there is a large memorial event in New York — it’s always in New York, whether the writer was born in Westchester or West Papua — at which the dead novelist’s celebrity-writer friends congregate, eyeing each other like ladies at the Venetian opera and wondering who will be the next out the door. Then come the obituaries, all of them glowing, disparagement stowed away behind words like “complicated” and “human”. Finally, after a period of two or three years, the great writer will undergo his or her final transubstantiation into a well-received literary biography, of massive length and usually scant readership.