“Why, I wondered, if the guy’s so anti-­everything, does he keep bothering to write?

From the vantage point of two decades and thousands of pages of Roth later, I don’t think it’s a bad question. My mistake was asking it rhetorically. If treated as a point of real inquiry, the question affords an opening, a way of reading and being reached by the work. For a writer so generously endowed in the irony department, Roth turns out to be astonishingly earnest. We see this in his excesses — not merely the prolificacy of his output, but the outrageousness of his characters’ offenses, their deeds, appetites, shames and confessions. Steaming along on the twin engines of intellect and humor (and what engines — horsepower through the roof), the novels transport us or run us over or both. His characters sometimes get caught up in a kind of Socratic Möbius strip, endlessly debating one another and themselves in a way that can verge on the tedious, but even then one cannot but marvel at his sheer energy, his unremitting investment in — what? Provocation. Interrogation. The feat of living. This is not a nihilist. This is a writer whose creative work lays bare the act of struggle.” - Leah Hager Cohen

(Read the rest of the review HERE)

I must say I haven’t read much of Roth’s work, just Portnoy’s Complaint, and I enjoyed it so much I wanted to read more, but I hesitated, always worrying that the humor I had enjoyed, the laugh out loud funnyness of that book didn’t exist in his other work. I read the synopses of his books and I still wonder.