"HERE WE ARE" is something we used to say a lot in our family. Usually when we arrived somewhere at the end of a lengthy journey. Philip Roth's long, eventful journey ended in 2018, at the age of 85. Benjamin Taylor accompanied him on the later part of that journey. Despite a twenty-year age difference, the two were close friends for more than a dozen years. Taylor describes their friendship thusly -

"There was no dramatic arc to our life together. It was not like a marriage, still less like a love affair. It was 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."

I so envy Ben Taylor that friendship. I began reading Roth's work more than fifty years ago, beginning with PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, a book which, at twenty-five, I found hilarious. Indeed, years later, Roth himself called it "a young man's book." Since then I have probably read more than a dozen Roth novels, as well as his memoir, PATRIMONY, about his family and his father's last days. More recently I read EVERYMAN, a much darker, sadder story which looked at aging, including the indignities of incontinence and impotence following a prostatectomy. It was a far cry from the antics of Alex Portnoy. In fact, I would go so far as to call it "an old man's book."

Taylor manages to be very even-handed in his portrayal of his friend, noting how vindictive and petty Roth could be, especially in his attitudes toward his two marriages and both ex-wives. He remained angry at his first wife, even after her death in an auto accident after they had separated. He even went so far as to call the man driving the car, who suffered only a minor injury, "My emancipator." Taylor points out that perhaps both wives had reason for divorcing Roth, calling him "undomesticatable." He quotes Roth as having told him, "Monogamy would not have been in me had I lived in the era of Cotton Mather. As it was, I lived in the era of SCREW magazine and Linda Lovelace." At the same time, however, Taylor's portrayal of their friendship shows how likable and human Roth could also be. They shared hundreds of meals together, often at second-rate restaurants, places Roth seemed to like. They watched movies together, although both had their own tastes. Roth hated attending live theater, but enjoyed hearing Taylor tell about it. And there seemed to be little vanity in the man, as "he cared nothing for clothes." Taylor describes Roth the private man as -

"... someone quite different from the persona devised for public purposes. Still vitally present at home was the young man he'd remained all along, full of satirical hijinks and gleeful vetriloquisms and antic fun building to crescendos ... A glint in the eye told you hilarity was on the way."

During my own college years, along with Roth, I also discovered Malamud, Bellow and Updike. So I was delighted to run across bits of conversations here about Roth's friendships with the latter two writers. Malamud is referenced only in a glancing way, with a question from Taylor about the name of the baseball player in THE NATURAL. Roth later answers, in a very roundabout way, telling of the probable basis for Malamud's novel, a real player with the 1949 Cubs who was shot in a hotel room by an ardent admirer.

In another conversation, Roth tells about how he wrote that now so prescient book, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA (2004), noting that FDR was the only president he knew for the first twelve years of his life, and, remembering Lindbergh's fascist leanings and "America First" campaign -

"I plunged all the familiar details into a counter-historical nightmare. I spent four years on the book, 2000-2004, and every night before drifting off I'd say to myself, 'Don't invent. Remember.'"

So yes, there are politics in here too. He despised the Dubya Bush presidency, as evidenced in EXIT GHOST, the last of the Zuckerman novels. And religion - "the refuge of the weak-minded."

There are so many more things in this slim little volume that moved me, making me laugh one moment, and nearly moving me to tears the next. Most notably this, in the last chapter, which details the final days of Philip Roth, and the multiple heart procedures he had endured -

"At our leave-taking, I said, 'You have been the joy of my life.' 'And you of mine,' he replied. I bent forward. He briefly put a hand on my head."

HERE WE ARE is, quite simply, a beautiful book, about an unlikely friendship, full of joy and laughter, tears and pain. I loved it. And so, finally, here we are. Thank you for writing it all down, Ben. And R.I.P., Philip. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )