Volume 45, Number 17 · November 5, 1998
Waiting for Lefty
By Robert Stone
I Married a Communist
by Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 323 pp., $26.00
In the 1970s, Philip Roth, already established as one of the country's important writers, began a series of novels that suggested the Central European surrealism for which he felt affinities and perhaps a distant filial regard. Hitherto, in such novels as When She Was Good, he had been the master of an intense but mainly traditional realism. With the political satire Our Gang, then with The Breast and The Great American Novel, he began to experiment with breaking down conventions. Introducing a writer al-ter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, in The Ghost Writer, he conducted Zuckerman through a number of novels employing self-conscious narrative techniques and episodes of story within story designed to shake the reader's balance and manipulate his relationship with the work in hand.
Review, 3237 words
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