My Own Private Philip Roth David Brauner (bio) I heard the news of Philip Roth's death at 8:10 a.m. UK time on Wednesday 23rd May. I had just turned on BBC Radio 4 to listen to the "Today" news program, as is my custom on a working day, and I heard a voice I inferred was Blake Bailey's talking about Roth's work. I knew instantly that he must have passed away. I spent the next fifteen minutes or so listening to further tributes. In spite of Roth's eminence, I was surprised at the detailed coverage they were giving his death—it was the lead story for most of the morning on all BBC channels—and I was wondering if I would be asked to comment. At 9:00 a.m. I got a call from the people at the University of Reading press office asking me if I would be available for interviews with the media. They had already received inquiries from news channels in France, Germany, and Switzerland. When I got to the media suite on campus, there was a palpable buzz of excitement with which I felt ghoulishly complicit; the fact that Roth's death was also something of a career opportunity for his critics, I consoled myself by thinking, was an irony that he himself—always a ruthless opportunist when it came to mining the material offered by life for his career—would have appreciated. Nonetheless, I found the next few hours exhausting and stressful: while still trying to process the news of Roth's death I was having to summarize his achievements in brief soundbites for five-minute reports on media outlets. For the most part, I was asked the predictable questions: "Was he a misgonynist?" (short answer, no; longer answer, he represented male sexuality, which can include elements of misogyny, unsparingly); "Why did he never win the Nobel?" (his work is too provocative and polarizing for the taste of the Swedish academy, who like to be able to issue cozy platitudes about the winning author); "What made him such an important writer?" (his restless reinvention of himself as a novelist, the power and intelligence of his writing). At the end of it all, I felt drained and somewhat cheapened and of course I felt that I had not done Roth justice. The next day, at work, colleagues kept coming up to me in the corridor or knocking at my office door to offer their condolences. I thanked them but [End Page 39] said that really it didn't feel particularly like a personal bereavement, because (a) I'd already mourned when Roth announced his retirement, while at the same time suspecting—hoping—that one final, posthumous work (Notes For My Biographer?) might appear, (b) he'd had a magnificent life, in which he'd achieved pretty much everything a writer could hope to achieve (the pesky absence of the Nobel notwithstanding) and (c) I didn't know the man personally. But in the days and weeks that followed I did begin, more and more, to feel Roth's death as a personal loss. Why? Partly because I've spent so many years reading, re-reading, teaching, and writing about him; but also because, however irrationally and unconsciously, I have come to feel that, at some level, I do enjoy a personal relationship with Roth; even that I own a part of him, my own private Philip Roth. Certainly, I owe a lot to Roth, in professional terms. When I began writing about him, as a graduate student working on a PhD at University College London in the early 1990s, I felt that I was flying in the face of literary fashion. A number of senior academics warned me that Jewish-American literature had had its moment and that Roth in particular was old news, a spent force. The smart money in the literary-critical marketplace of contemporary U.S. fiction was going on Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis, and David Foster Wallace. Although The Counterlife had received the best reviews of any Roth novel since The Ghost Writer, his status in 1990 was at best semi-canonical. By the...