[Robert DeLong]

de mortuis nihil nisi bonum translates to: Of the dead, nothing but good

[x]

Politically and morally, Roth was a mess. What he put Clare Bloom through! But really, shouldn't she have known what was in store for her? Didn't she read his novels?

Nonetheless, Philip Roth was a good writer. The problem was that after you read hundreds of pages about the glove-making industry in Newark, NJ, did you really want to read hundreds more about the parks system or the butcher shops of the same city? Especially since all that is gone now.

I know, they said the same thing about Faulkner. But sometimes "they" were right. You might not have wanted to keep taking those fictional trips to Yoknapatapha county, and it was the same way about Weequahic.

The best comment about Roth came from an (I think) Asian-American reviewer who read The Plot Against America and said that she learned from the book that if FDR had been defeated we would have had concentration camps in the US (think about it a minute).

[miss marmelstein]

Oh, Claire Bloom’s memoir is a howler! I read it a few years ago. I once was seated next to her at a dinner. She was as pretty and nice as an Englishwoman can be. Philip Roth is a nut - he used to hang outside my college in NYC looking for the prettiest girls (who were all the richest, too!) Dick Cavett and Alan Alda used to hang out in front as well. Not Donald Trump. He just met them at dances and asked them out to Maxwell’s Plum.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

Great read. Steyn is at his best when he dismantles pretentious literati.

I always had contempt for Roth, and could never be bothered with more than reading a few pages of his stuff. You knew immediately where it was going with characters whose lives held no interest. Today someone could program a computer to write his dross.

I love Steyn's description of William F. Buckley's sparring partner, and friend of Claire Bloom, Gore Vidal:

The jacket tells its tale as much as anything inside. The two male friends she turns to for enthusiastic endorsements are Vidal and John Gielgud, neither of whom has any reputation -- how shall we put this? -- as a ladies' man.

Some might remember Buckley's famous exchange with Vidal:

BUCKLEY (snarling, teeth bared): Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face, and you’ll stay plastered …