Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays

“Whatever difficulty and hardship Roth’s art embodies, it’s almost exclusively borne of the neurotic Jewish psyche he inherited.”

This statement gives little credit to either Roth’s technique in creating the persuasive illusion called “literature,” or his creative choices (e.g., the masks his characters speak through) as an artist. The implication being that Roth the writer is merely a platform of expression for this “neurotic Jewish psyche” you speak of.

Leaving aside the tremendous irony that this fabled Jewish neurosis was one of the tropes Roth chose to *play* with (in a comedic sense) during his long apprenticeship as an American Master (you’ll find the Borscht-Belt “neurosis” gags have evaporated from the white-hot universalism of Late Roth), I’m a little shaken to find the lazy thinking behind this retrograde libel being trotted out in such an offhand manner in this “modern” book review.

Comment by Steven Augustine from Berlin — June 11, 2007 @ 11:46 am