- Published: 2 March 2015
- ISBN: 9780099587668
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 368
- RRP: $29.99
Roth Unbound
- Published: 2 March 2015
- ISBN: 9780099587668
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 368
- RRP: $29.99
Roth Unbound has two particularly strong selling points. It is the first full-length study to be published since Roth’s announcement that Nemesis would be his final novel. It is therefore the first to cover what currently looks to be his entire oeuvre... Secondly, Roth has made himself available as a commentator on – if not wholly a collaborator with – Pierpont's project, with the result that her account of his life and works is supplemented with marginal illuminations from her subject himself.
Bharat Tandon, Literary Review
A celebration… an illuminating companion to Roth's work.
Economist
The first study of the complete oeuvre... Roth collaborated with [Pierpont], answering questions, contributing asides as she writes. The effect is surreal. Ten pages of Pierpont’s sparky prose can go by without interruption. Then she’ll say, "Speaking today about this encounter, Roth remarks..." as if the great man has been sitting by her side all the time, peering to see the sentences unfold, his breath in her ear.
John Walsh, Sunday Times
[Pierpont] binds the books to the man not by mining them for nuggets of autobiographical information but by talking to Roth himself about what he put into them, by which she doesn’t mean the facts, but the territory of imagination and self that creates fiction... What Pierpont has achieved is to defeat speculation. Whatever we think we know, turns out to be wrong.
Linda Grant, Independent
Pierpont knows her (somewhat inaccessible) subject and has punctuated her narrative with conversational snippets. A must for fans.
Rachel Cooke, Observer
[Pierpont’s] appraisal is the first of its kind to defend Roth in any depth... As an old-fashioned critical biography, Roth Unbound has much new to say about the novelist’s life and work.
Ian Thomson, Financial Times
A lucid, tender, illuminating study, beautifully poised between intimacy and detachment.
Caroline Moore, Spectator
Sympathetic, astute and observant... This is not a conventional biography...it is a 300-plus page profile, drawing on what is palpably a mutually respectful friendship.
Alan Taylor, Herald
The closest thing yet to a biography of the US’ greatest living writer. After years of interviews, the author has as much to say about Roth’s life (he dated Jackie Kennedy) as his extraordinary body of work.
Olivia Cole
In its sense of emotion recollected in tranquillity it captures the seductive humanity of Roth the writer and man, and not far from the surface, still just enough of what his whoring hero Mickey Sabbath called "preposterone", that obscenely generative spark that has brought his words to such vivid life.
Tim Adams, Guardian
[Pierpont's] book manages the immensely difficult feat of remaining both warm-hearted and critically balanced. The result is a useful key to Roth's work and a sequence of incidental portraits that...one wouldn't swap for anything.
Tim Martin, Daily Telegraph
Most rewarding.
David Sexton, Evening Standard
For the first time, New Yorker literary critic Claudia Roth Pierpont brings us the story of Roth's creative life... Roth Unbound is filled with insights gleaned from Pierpont's years of conversations and interviews with the author.
Jewish Chronicle
Where Pierpont’s strength comes to the fore is in making the more familiar elements of the story come to life... What could easily have been a dry academic text is as compelling as a thriller... Like all of the best autobiographical works, it serves to refresh your enthusiasm for a great writer (and also distract once more from the apparent truth of the fact that there really will be no more new Philip Roth books).
Bookmunch
[A] shrewd critical biography
Leo Robson, New Statesman
Lively and clever… A critical biography of the old school, though one invaluably topped up with reported comments and judgments from the Philip Roth of today.
Martin Amis, Scotsman
A very fine book... [Pierpont] manages to combine an almost Leavis-like talent for close reading with a very un-Leavis-like ability to locate works in the wider world of history and culture.
Spiked Online
Elegantly written and invariably perceptive.
Jonathan O'Brien, Sunday Business Post
Fascinating in its own right, Roth Unbound is valuable in showing us that the work and the man behind them speak with the same voice.
Neil Stewart, Civilian
[A] tender, detailed book.
Adam Thirlwell, Times Literary Supplement
Thought-provoking
Justine Carbery, Sunday Independent
A superb study of the novelist Philip Roth by a sharp biographer
William Leith, Evening Standard