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Philip Roth Message Board 2/19/2008 1:45:50 AM
Talk about the novels, new and used books that Roth has written!

Author Roth's Book Reviews

American Pastoral
The Swede is a strikingly good-looking man, born blonde to a Jewish family in mid-20th century New Jersey, and is outstanding at everything he attempts (in particular, sports of all kinds), in addition to being a highly intelligent and sensitive person. His parents are second-generation Americans; his grandfather built an empire in the glove industry and passed his glove business down to the Swede's father, who in turn passed it to him. The Swede is admi...
Goodbye, Columbus
Roth paints a portrait of rural America and two young kids who stumble into a relationship, the odd struggles they go through, the Jewish presence of Brenda Patimkin's parents and the split between being rich and being poor, sex and marriage of the 1950's in Goodbye Columbus. The main character, Neal, dragged to a pool club by one of his relatives for the day, first meets soon-to-be love interest Brenda, who skips up to him and asks him to hold her g...
My Life as a Man
MY LIFE AS A MAN is a book published by Philip Roth in 1974. Peter Tarnopol is a very successful young writer trying to get rid of his psychotic wife Maureen by all the New-York legal ways. Condemned to pay high alimonies to her, he wants to describe their relationship in his second novel. He will be helped in his task by Dr. Spielvogel, a psychiatrist who's patiently hearing Peter's nightmarish souvenirs. Peter Tarnopol will discover, a little too la...
Operation Shylock
Operation Shylock tells the story of an American Jew author, Philip Roth, who hears that someone has been using his name in Israel to promote the ideology of Diasporism, that the European Jews of Israel should return to their homelands in Europe. The protagonist narrator, the author Philip Roth, seems to be based on the author of the book itself. If the story told were not so absurd—Philip Roth eventually becomes a spy for the Mossad—we might believe t...

Roth booklist

Our Gang
OUR GANG is a political satire written in three months by Philip Roth in 1971. Trick E. Dixon is the President of the United States with a little problem. People don't like him, even the boy-scouts of America dare to organize a demonstration in front of the White House. In the company of his advisors, he analyzes the situation and decides to fight the very causes of the Evil in America. So he will declare war against the pro-pornographic danish govern...
Portnoy's Complaint
This is a story about Alexander Portnoy, a Jewish boy with a big nose and big ego who loves sex. Unfortunately, he was brought up in an extremely strict household with high expectations, and as a result has strongly conflicting feelings regarding the world of sex. Portnoy has a strong sex drive, and though there is nothing more that he wishes for but a normal, loving family with kids, he knows he could never settle down because of his wandering libido....
Sabbath's Theater
A debauched puppeteer, now settling into a lonely old age, grapples with his life's many failures, both professional and personal. When we first meet Mickey Sabbath, he has lost everything. And he has no one to blame but himself. A life of compulsive lechery and caustically cynical behavior bordering on the sociopathic has finally caught up to him. But even that is not enough to cause him anything remotely close to remorse. He relates to us the story of ...
The Dying Animal
David Kepesh is in his sixties, a professor at a New York college and TV culture critic when he becomes sexually obsessed with 24-year-old Consuela Castillo, the daughter of wealthy Cuban immigrants. He relates the course of their strange, 18-month relationship as well as referring briefly to earlier times of his life: his short, conventional 1950s marriage (long ended); his rotten relationship with his 42-year-old son; the way he went along permanently ...
The Ghost Writer
THE GHOSTWRITER has been published in 1979. Nathan Zuckerman is a young American writer who's just published three successful novelettes. He sends his last work to his father, a member of the New-York Jewish community and must face his disappointment in front of the written description of family events that could provoke antisemitism among Nathan's readers. Nathan leaves New-York for Massachussetts where he meets his father in literature, Lonof, a sec...
The Great American Novel
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL is a book published by Philip Roth in 1973. This is the sad story of the Ruppert Mundys, a baseball team of the mythical Patriot League, how they were forced in the year 1943 to play all their games away because their owner sold their home stadium to the U.S. Army. The book is an excellent satire of the american society....

Philip Roth list of books

The Human Stain
Narrator Nathan Zuckerman, a successful writer, has retired to the Berkshires near the small New England college of Athena, and becomes friendly with a neighbor named Coleman Silk. Silk is a retired classics professor who resigned after a campus scandal in which he was wrongly accused of racism after a chance and misunderstood remark. As Zuckerman gets to know Silk (they're both secular Jews), it's the era of President Clinton's difficulties with Moni...
The Plot Against America
In "The Plot Against America," Roth returns to a pivotal point in American history, alters the outcome, and revises his life story accordingly. The crucial moment Roth selects is the presidential election of 1940: in Roth's fictionalized America, incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt loses to Charles Lindburgh. Roth constructs his novel around Lindburgh's political leanings, a side-note that textbooks generally play down. In "The Plot Against America...
The Professor of Desire
THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE is a novel published in 1977. David Kepesh is a professor of literature obsessed by the idea of Desire, in novels as well as in his own personal life. Just after his college years, he enjoyed in Europe, in the company of two swedish girls, all the degrees of a free sexuality. As a young professor, he met a blonde beauty with a mysterious past spent in Asia and married her. But the desire slowly died and a depressive divorced Ke...
When She Was Good
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Zuckerman Unbound
ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND is a novel published in 1981. Nathan Zuckerman is now a reknown writer; his fourth novel, Carnovsky, has become a bestseller and Zuckerman is the target of the People Press. But with celebrity appear new problems! Nathan is harrassed by a mysterious man who threatens to kidnap and kill his mother in Miami if the young successful writer doesn't give him $50,000 in cash in the next 48 hours. Furthermore, his own father is agonizing in ...