Last Thursday Stuart Brent looked out the window of his Michigan Avenue store and glared at the freezing drizzle. “And then the rain turned to snow,” he says. “And I looked up and said, ‘God, at this late stage in my life are you going to turn me down?’”
The party, says Brent, “was the apotheosis of my lifetime. It culminated everything I’ve done. Philip Roth said he never, ever allowed anyone to give him a party. But he said, ‘In your case, I’ll do it.’ I proceeded to make it my greatest party.”
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Roth, however, signed all 20 copies.
But Roth wasn’t eager to discuss other kinds of gossip on Saturday morning, when he was back at Brent’s to sign a few more books. I started to tell him about the time I met his sister-in-law, a local real estate agent who was then married to Roth’s brother, a local artist.
“She wasn’t my wife. I wasn’t married to her,” said Roth.
