Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor

 If one doesn't have the stomach to read Blake Bailey's biography of Philip Roth one can read Benjamin Taylor's slim volume about his friendship with Roth, where Roth's misogyny is on full display.  Roth comes across like a college freshman who never matured, making endless snobbish remarks and telling unfunny jokes while blaming others for the fact that he never received the Nobel Prize he felt he deserved.  At one point Taylor tries to interest Roth in the films of the great director Douglas Sirk but "we got no further than the overheated credits to Written on the Wind.  'What do you see in all this Hollywood dreck, Ben? I really want to know.'  His own tastes run to Kurosawa, and Satyajit Ray and Fellini."  To me this is conclusive evidence that Roth's view of the world is quite limited and lacking in a sense of irony about himself and everyone else. Taylor's praise of Roth's late works are unconvincing;  I think only The Plot Against America (2004), an alternate history, is at all successful.