The Facts

How does a novelist write about the facts of his life after spending years fictionalising those facts with irrepressible daring and originality?What becomes of 'the facts' after they have been smelted down for art's sake? In The Facts - Philip Roth's idiosyncratic autobiography - we find out. Focusing on five episodes in his life, Roth gives a portrait of his secure city childhood in Newark, through to his first marriage, clashes with the Jewish establishment over Goodbye, Columbus and his writing of Portnoy's Complaint. In true Rothian style, his fictional self Nathan Zuckerman is allowed the final, coruscating word of reply.

The Facts is the unconventional autobiography of a writer who has reshaped our idea of fiction - a work of compelling candour and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art.

The Facts is the unconventional autobiography of a writer who has reshaped our idea of fiction - a work of compelling candour and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art.Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from this life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties, his education in American life at a conventional college in the fifties, his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the 'girl of my dreams' Roth calls her), his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by Goodbye, Columbus, and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write Portnoy's Complaint.The book concludes surprisingly - in true Rothian fashion - with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.