Here We Are

My Friendship with Phillip Roth

Benjamin Taylor

Are We to Be Spared Nothing? – I got off on the wrong foot with Phillip Roth; namely, “The Breast,” his least successful book in more ways than one. Roth’s friend Benjamin Taylor’s judgment on that particular work? It “is lousy any way you look at it.” Taylor’s sweet memoir brings the great author to life in an intimate way. “There was no dramatic arc to our life together,” Taylor writes. “It was not like a marriage, still less like a love affair. It was as plotless as friendship ought to be. We spent thousands of hours in each other’s company. He was fully half my life. I cannot hope for another such friend.” Taylor recalls their meals and conversations together in New York and in the country as well as Roth’s many medical emergencies. On one such trip to New York-Presbyterian, Roth is in pain and the two men enter the back of a city taxi whose driver is “aggressively flatulent” and blasting Rush Limbaugh over the radio. “Phillip turns to me, his face a study. ‘Are we to be spared nothing?’ he asks.” Such laughter in the midst of agony – sparked by the perfect phrase – is how I now think of Phillip Roth. And I so look forward to diving, at last, into the deep end of his other works.