Word: roth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...three were foreigners, and all said they were journalists. One was a British photographer, George Andrew Roth, who had often worked on stories with the Bolivian army; he was released. The second was a mediocre Argentine painter named Giro Roberto Bustos, who belonged to the Communist Party but considered it "bourgeois...
When She Was Good fails because, in abandoning his studies of Jewish family life, Roth also puts aside the literary techniques associated with--but of course not confined to--that type of writing. Rather than characterizing people through details such as revealing gestures and speech patterns, he presents unconvincing, over-simplified generalizations about them. He substitutes dull and predictable dialogue for the illuminating conversations in his earlier books. And rather than satirizing his characters subtly and skillfully, he indulges in painfully obvious satire. (This heavy-handed treatment may, of course, reflect the pressing concern about America which motivated the book...
...many respects When She Was Good represents a departure about as shaking as a sonic boom. Philip Roth repeats some of his old themes, but his story is about Lucy, a Midwestern girl living in a small Midwestern town. Horrified by her drunken father, she rejects completely, literally and figuratively sending him to jail. And she adopts rigidly moral ideas about her own life. By being "good" she manages to destroy everything she touches and, eventually, to kill herself while pregnant with the child she conceived to force her husband into a sense of responsibility...
Doubtless many preoccupations encouraged Roth to turn to this type of plot. He probably wanted to expand his own horizons, to escape from the limitations of writing that sub-genus of novel, "Jewish fiction." Perhaps he felt that the kind of book he had been writing has been overworked in the United States as well as in his own career. But When She Was Good also seems motivated by a drive to make a more general point about America than Roth had previously done. Lucy is trying to uphold the morals which symbolize smalltown America and, indeed, "the American...
...flashes of the perceptive wit which marked Roth's previous books do occur. His next book will be far more successful if Roth can develop important statements about America like those in When She Was Good by means of the brilliant details' of his previous books...