For those who like this sort of guy …

… that's the sort of guy they like: Philip Roth & Friend | National Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Roth’s flaws, which were not few, are mentioned but never dwelt upon in Here We Are. Taylor reports that “Philip was allergic to the idea that he could have been at fault in either of his unhappy marriages and to the idea that the party of the other part might have had grievances worth considering.” He notes that Roth “could not get enough of revenge.” He needed, in any conflict, he tells us, “morally to prevail,” which reinforces Irving Howe’s remark about Roth’s need in his fiction for “a stance of superiority.” In searching for a biographer, Taylor writes, Roth was looking “for a ventriloquist’s dummy to sit on his lap” and praise him. As for the Nobel prize, which he had expected to win and came to call “the Anybody-But-Roth Prize,” Taylor reports that Roth’s bitterness over never receiving it became “increasingly tedious over the years.” Roth’s atheism, which comes up in Taylor’s pages, seems in its sophistication not above the high-school level. Roth adored the films of Ingmar Bergman, and when Hannah Arendt called the Bergman movie Cries and Whispers “Scandinavian kitsch,” which it is, he was thrown. Furthest though this was from Benjamin Taylor’s intention, the Philip Roth who emerges from his pages seems neither deep nor even likeable.