The fall of the intellectual Where have all the great thinkers gone?
In the month before it was pulled by its publisher because of its author’s alleged sexual predations, Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth produced an outpouring of terrifically entertaining reviews in the literary pages of East Coast periodicals – the New Republic, Harper’s and the New Yorker. The essays were a lot of fun; they were also implicitly nostalgic for the novelistic world that Roth so egomaniacally bestrode. At Toni Morrison’s death in 2019 I suggested in the New York Times that she might be the last “Great American Novelist”, meaning not the last good novelist (good novels are still regularly published) but the last writer who “made novels seem essential to an educated person’s understanding of her country”. That might be premature – Cormac McCarthy is still living, after all – but in the sheer energy and delight of the Roth reviews you can feel a cultural pulse that contemporary fiction rarely stirs, unless it is getting adapted by HBO or being considered (with the Roth biography itself) as a candidate for cancellation.