The structure of Roth’s fiction is based often upon identifying tirades rather than actions and counter-actions, tirades of perfervid brilliance, and this is what he can do standing on his head or hanging out the window if need be. The tirades are not to be thought of as mere angry outbursts in the kitchen after a beer or two, although they are usually angry enough since most of the characters are soreheads of outstanding volubility.
Authors Philip Roth
Nancy Crampton
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If I hadn’t been analyzed I wouldn’t have written Portnoy’s Complaint as I wrote it, or My Life as a Man as I wrote it, nor would The Breast resemble itself. Nor would I resemble myself. The experience of psychoanalysis was probably more useful to me as a writer than as a neurotic, although there may be a false distinction there.
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I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Philip Roth
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In the conservative contemporary American literary landscape, Philip Roth is the only one of our anointed writers still willing to re-invent himself and his writing, to experiment with new forms in a public venue and so risk failing before his large and adoring audience, and for that alone he deserves admiration.
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Roth’s particular brand of misogyny is often almost excusable—merely an ineffective answer to the important questions he raises about the relationships between sons and mothers or husbands and wives. And it’s not really the misogyny […] that takes the breath away as much as the gynophobia, the refusal to understand that women might have a stake in the most serious political questions of their time […] and so might want to do something to address those questions.
American Pastoral