Katha Pollitt on Philip Roth and Blake Bailey and dudely misogyny:

By now the whole world knows why Norton made its decision. Four former students from [Bailey’s] days in the 1990s teaching middle school have accused him of showering them with sexualized attention in eighth grade and after, and then pouncing on them as young adults. One has accused him of rape. (Another subsequently came forward to accuse him of attempted rape in 2005.) A few days later, Valentina Rice, a New York publishing executive, went public with a claim that he raped her in 2015.

Just the guy to write a biography of Philip Roth, frankly.

I have so many questions. Could the Times have dug deeper? It published multiple pieces around the book, including a laudatory profile of Bailey by Mark Oppenheimer, an affectionate guide to all things Roth by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a mixed review by Parul Sehgal, and an adulatory one by Cynthia Ozick (“a narrative masterwork”). As for Norton, of course they should have followed up with Rice, but beyond that, what? Rejected the book on the basis of an accusation? Hired a detective? I’m not making light of the women’s charges—I believe them—but I don’t know that publishers are equipped to adjudicate claims of wrongdoing by their writers even if they wanted to. And where does it all end? Rape is a crime, but “grooming” eighth graders and coming on to them after they turn legal is not.

Nor is being a misogynist or a creep. I heard Bailey speak recently, via Zoom, to the New York Institute of the Humanities and had no trouble picking up on his manly self-delight and nudge-nudge-wink-wink smutty “humor” (they bonded over Roth’s missed opportunity, as he claimed, to date Ali McGraw), complete with a Southern “gay” accent when he quoted Truman Capote. His hero worship of Roth was on full view: He clearly thought it was funny that Roth badgered a girlfriend into listening to him masturbate on the phone while she was at work.

It’s all so…dull, frankly. Boring. Junior high.

Now social media is replete with attacks on Bailey from well-known women writers: Parul Sehgal, Mary Karr, Moira Donegan, E. Jean Carroll, and many more. Ruth Franklin has tweeted her rightful anger at Bailey’s Wall Street Journal review of her biography of Shirley Jackson, which he accused of being excessively “feminist” and insufficiently sympathetic to Jackson’s flagrantly unfaithful husband.

Bitches are so demanding and unfair.

But the first wave of reviews was almost all flattery.

Of the early reviews, only Laura Marsh at The New Republic really took the measure of Bailey’s disdain for every woman in Roth’s life who didn’t behave exactly as he wanted when he wanted her to, beginning with his two wives, Maggie Martinson and Claire Bloom, whom he portrays as selfish harpies. “Women in this book are forever screeching, berating, flying into a rage, and storming off,” writes Marsh, “as if their emotions exist solely for the purpose of sapping a man’s creative energies.”

It sounds just like Roth himself. Why didn’t it jump off the page at the reviewers?

Given Roth’s genius and stature, did reckoning with his biographer’s excessive masculine solidarity seem unsophisticated, too crude a reading, too “feminist”? At the Institute of the Humanities Zoom, no one asked a question that got within a hundred miles of women.

Well, women, you know – such a trivial subject. You might as well talk about whether Roth was kind to poodles or not.