Volume 21, Number 10 · June 13, 1974
Hooked
By Michael Wood
My Life as a Man
by Philip Roth
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 330 pp., $8.95
Some years ago Philip Roth suggested that reality had become so inventive and prolific, so replete with improbable characters like Eisenhower and his political descendants, that the writer of fiction was more or less out of a job in America. What could he do, faced with imaginative competition of the kind the world threw at him every day? That Nixon should proceed to act out in comic and scaring fact the hypothetical and mildly satirical scenario of Our Gang is a wonderful tribute to Roth's moral intelligence, but it is also a threat, in his terms, to his vocation as a novelist. With such a president and such a country, who needs novels?
Review, 2325 words
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