"There was no dramatic arc to our life together," Benjamin Taylor (Proust: The Search) writes in Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth. "It was as plotless as friendship ought to be." Here We Are is this plot-free fellowship's enchanting coda, which had the late novelist's blessing: "Maybe write a book about our friendship," Roth once told Taylor.
Taylor estimates that between their first meeting in 1994 and Roth's death in 2018, they spent literally thousands of hours together, often at Roth's Manhattan apartment or Connecticut retreat. They talked about "everything" but especially, it would seem, Roth's work. Taylor laces Here We Are with a critic's observations (Sabbath's Theater is Roth's "hymn of praise to the sex drive out of season") and confirms that Roth took revenge on his enemies by turning them into satirical characters in his books: "The appetite for vengeance was insatiable. Philip could not get enough of getting even."
Taylor's bemusement with his friend ripples through Here We Are. He touches on Roth's idiosyncrasies (Roth had low standards in restaurants) and on his big opinions on small matters (Roth clashed with Taylor over whether Bette Davis or Ava Gardner held more significance). Taylor also shares snippets from their darker conversations, about Roth's stay at a psychiatric facility in 1993 and his physical decline. By the time Taylor writes of Roth, "He was the chosen parent of my middle age," readers will have already spotted in the childless Roth an unlikely but eager father figure. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer