Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. It was our job to love them.”“American Pastoral,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, may be the most realized of Roth’s novels. Among other things, the ability he displays in it to write about children, while having had none of his own, is nothing short of mind-shaking. For certain other readers, his greatest novel may be the vastly darker “Sabbath’s Theater” (1995), about an aging and priapic ex-puppeteer. Roth wrote about the joys of both “phonetic seduction” and “a finely calibrated relative clause.”

Source: New York Times May 23, 2018 12:19 UTC