Word: roth
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This spring an unusual and virtually simultaneous blooming of senior novelists is taking place. Norman Mailer (see following review), Saul Bellow, the mysterious Thomas Pynchon and a seemingly perennial Philip Roth all have new works scheduled for publication. American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin; 423 pages; $26) is Roth's fourth offering in fewer than seven years, making the 64-year-old a sort of Cal Ripkin of American letters...
...Roth's three previous books--Patrimony, Operation Shylock and Sabbath's Theater--won leading literary prizes, which is no small achievement in the contentious world of book awards. American Pastoral could make Roth's record four for four...
...novel is a scorcher about prosperous New Jersey parents whose picture-perfect life is destroyed when their daughter becomes a terrorist. This cultural horror story is deepened by Roth's genius for blending humor, pathos, sympathy and rage. The effect is visceral, a queasy feeling that the bottom has fallen out of civilization, and despite our faith in reason, irrationality rules. "He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach--that it makes no sense," Roth writes about his paragon of decency and convention, Seymour ("Swede") Levov, star athlete of Weequahic High in Newark, New Jersey, during the early...
...Writers often disguise their lives as fiction," Leavitt tells Ben near the end of the novella. "The thing they almost never do is disguise fiction as their lives." This is not quite true. Paul Theroux offered an invented autobiography last year in My Other Life, and Philip Roth did much the same in 1993 in Operation Shylock. The Term Paper Artist is as playful as those works and every bit as good...
...executive who declined to participate is Joe Roth, chairman of the Disney studios, which did well with the Travolta film Phenomenon. "Bert made it less about [Scientology] and more about connecting to feelings about the Holocaust," says Roth. "Either that, or they're all whores for Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and they wanted to be on the right list...