Audiobook Review: Remembering Roth, by James Atlas (2019)

 

The audiobook Remembering Roth, written and read by James Atlas, 2019.

Writer and biographer James Atlas, 1949-2019.

The writer and biographer James Atlas was a friend of Philp Roth’s for 40 years. Atlas wrote and narrated an audiobook in 2019 about his relationship with Roth, Remembering Roth, exclusively for Audible.com. Atlas died later that same year, so it’s fortunate that his recollections of Roth were preserved.

After I finished Benjamin Taylor’s book Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth, one of the reviews I read on Goodreads pointed me in the direction of Remembering Roth. While Taylor’s book is mostly all pleasant memories, including a touching deathbed scene between Taylor and Roth, Remembering Roth is a tale written by a friend of Roth’s who had an eventual falling out with the author.

Atlas first met Philip Roth after Roth sent him an admiring letter about Atlas’ biography of the poet Delmore Schwartz. Roth and Atlas became good friends for several years. Atlas says that their relationship changed a bit after Atlas had children and couldn’t hang out with Philip at a moment’s notice. (This was something I noted in my review of Taylor’s book—Taylor clearly doesn’t have a family, because there’s no one complaining about all the time he’s spending with his buddy Philip.)

But the real turning point in Atlas’ relationship with Roth was when Roth suggested that Atlas write the biography of Saul Bellow. (This was when Saul Bellow was still alive.) Atlas became Bellow’s biographer, and over time it became obvious that Roth was nervous about how sympathetic to Bellow the biography would be. When the biography was published in 2000, Roth chose Bellow over Atlas, and attacked the book. It doesn’t seem as though the biography was a hatchet job on Bellow, but Atlas makes it clear in Remembering Roth that by the end of writing the book, while he still admired Bellow’s art, he didn’t actually admire the man very much. From that point on, Roth and Atlas were more of acquaintances than real friends.

An odd connection between James Atlas and Benjamin Taylor: while Atlas wrote a biography of Saul Bellow, and was the editor for the Library of America editions of Bellow’s novels, Taylor has edited collections of Bellow’s letters and non-fiction pieces.

Atlas does a nice job of describing Roth’s impact in person, saying that Roth was the most charismatic man he’d ever met. Roth was a performer, entertaining his friends with anecdotes and stories. Atlas says at the beginning of Remembering Roth: “Our friendship mattered more to me than to Roth. How could it not?” I suspect that’s often the case when one person is famous and the other is not. Atlas was a fan of Roth’s writing years before he ever met Roth, so the relationship was somewhat off-balance from the beginning. That’s not to say that true friendships can’t develop between famous people and non-famous people, it’s just an assessment of status that might ultimately color the relationship.

There’s one odd moment, when Atlas refers to Roth’s “American Trilogy” as American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. Every other reference I’ve seen to Roth’s “American Trilogy” replaces The Plot Against America with I Married a Communist. But then Atlas makes it clear he doesn’t care for I Married a Communist, so maybe to him it’s not part of the trilogy?

Remembering Roth is an interesting work, and it’s short, less than 90 minutes long. I’d recommend it for fans of Roth, as it gives us a feeling for what Philip Roth was like, and why being his friend might have been a challenging task.