From a remembrance delivered last May at a memorial service for Philip Roth. Taylor is a professor of writing at the New School. His most recent book, The Hue and Cry at Our House, was published in 2017 by Penguin Books.

In The Ghost Writer, narrator Nathan Zuckerman says of the novelist Felix Abravanel that the master’s charm was “a moat so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect.” Philip, too, could seem a beguiling but remote citadel: august, many-towered, lavishly defended. Those who reached the…