Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsOne of the greatest novels on the America of our times
Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2019
Nothing I can say would be more useful than this extract from Nicholas Lezard's book review in The Guardian (3/17/2001):
"The stuff about dumb, hysterical America is, it turns out, only background noise, the backdrop to a picture of a century where matters of race, ambition, character and war come together like a car crash. It is a fizzing, unplayable spitball of a book, almost unfairly brilliant, its sentences the familiar Roth string of ungainsayable urgency, intelligence and passion.
This novel not only stares death - "the ceaseless perishing" - in the face, it stares the whole unruly parade of our lives in the face, and declares, more eloquently and persuasively than anything else you will have read on the subject, that we are imperfect fabricators of our own destinies. And, by the way, that as a novelist Roth is in a league of his own."
