Volume 35, Number 15 · October 13, 1988
Vita Nuova
By Thomas R. Edwards
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography
by Philip Roth
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 195 pp., $17.95
What Philip Roth calls an autobiography turns out to be a fairly short book that says little directly about his life since the 1960s, as if to suggest that he found the 'material' for his fiction early. He had what sounds like a rather pleasant childhood; he went to college and graduate school, and did well. He made an awful first marriage, his writings offended many of his fellow Jews, he suffered various physical and psychic ailments, he found domestic and professional success. The facts in The Facts aren't extraordinary or copious; as he complains in a prefatory letter to his invented character Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's life now seems to him painfully less alive than his books:
Review, 2993 words
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