Here We Are
My Friendship with Philip Roth
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5.0 • 2개의 평가
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- US$5.99
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Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award
A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend.
I had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of "the natural," the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened in-to puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, "No more books." Thus he announced his retirement.
So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend.
Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor's memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taylor (The Hue and Cry at Our House) begins his loving "partial portrait" of his best friend and "chosen parent," author Philip Roth, in 2018, when the ailing literary lion, nearing death, comforts Taylor: "I have been to see the great enemy, and walked around him, and talked to him, and he is not to be feared. I promise." He meditates on Roth's virtues and vulnerabilities: he had "insatiable emotional appetites... he seethed with loathing or desire," Taylor writes. He was passionate about his beloved hometown of Newark, N.J., which he "endlessly rediscovered through alchemical imagination." One of Roth's more curious vulnerabilities, Taylor notes, was that, though hailed as a great sexual libertine of 20th-century literature, Roth was plagued by fears of disapproval "as acutely as any itch in the loins." His irritants included bitterness about not winning a Nobel Prize, and disliking George Plimpton's "supreme self-assurance." Taylor weaves many of the pair's lighter moments throughout, including their ritual Sunday night Chinese dinners and their spirited movie nights (Taylor preferred Hollywood classics; Roth was a Kirosawa and Fellini fan). "I'm not who I'd have been without him," he concludes. This tender-hearted and eloquent paean to long-term friendships will hold special appeal among Roth fans.
