On the evidence of his latest novel, The Ghost Writer,… Philip Roth continues to be a promising writer.

Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus, comprised a collection of stories and a novella. They were written in a voice that was mordantly funny, yet inflected with a quality of seriousness. It was uniquely suited to the lightly-borne anguish of Roth's fictional situations and capable of sustaining interest in the fairly specialized conflicts of which it spoke.

He was writing about American Jews—both the assimilated ones, who take the land of plenty in their well-heeled stride, and the bewildered ones, who look backwards to the insular, clearly-defined world of the shtetl—with the mixture of derision and affection that comes from the too-lucid understanding of a writer straddling two histories himself. The ancient and the new were juxtaposed in the title novella, Goodbye, Columbus, to startling effect; one saw how cultures accommodate and resist each other; and, remarkably, Roth enabled us to grasp this struggle almost entirely through dialogue. (p. 18)

Roth's impeccable ear not only captured what was being said, but what was left unsaid as well. This talent would take him far, all the way to the indiscretions and rantings of his first big commercial success, Portnoy's Complaint. It would also hinder his developing the themes that engage him beyond the obsessional. (pp. 18-19)

Letting Go, his second novel, was a lengthy work of almost Hardyesque sobriety. It concerned a group of floundering post-adolescents, and it evoked the atmosphere of emotional stagnation as much by the settings—the academic communities of Iowa and Chicago—as by the malaise of the characters. The novel was a turnabout in being distinctly nonethnic—problems caused by Jewishness now ceded to problems caused by humanness—and self-consciously literary: The street-wise, punchy story-teller of Goodbye, Columbus was replaced by a brooding, cerebral spirit, an earnest forger of the links joining the exigencies of Life to the meditations of Art. Letting Go seems to me to contain some of Roth's best writing; he convincingly grappled with the besetting anxieties of manhood that later become suspended in caricature. Roth explored this side of himself—the old-style moralist—once more, and markedly less successfully, in When She Was Good, a bleak portrait of feminine willfulness.

After that the tragic muse was abandoned in favor of the scandalously comic: Portnoy beat his breast on Dr. Spielvogel's couch and the public responded with appreciative laughter. Roth apparently discovered that he didn't have to labor at probing moral depths or drawing social pictures when he had such a fast-hitting method of one-liners and sketchy characterizations to fall back on. His next three novels, Our Gang, The Breast and The Great American Novel, all skated on the thin ice of hostile fantasy and an increasingly wild humor. The regressive, infantile streak that had always been a component of his temperament was allowed to usurp his more subtle and considered traits. The consequences were disastrous, because as a bad boy Roth just isn't bad—i.e., inventive—enough: He is still trying to shock Mother.

My Life as a Man signalled yet another adjustment in Roth's treatment of his fictional material. The focus turned sharply inward; the satire was directed intrapsychically rather than at national pastimes or institutions. The author recaptured some of the poignancy of his first book by the simple act of retracing his steps back to the germinating obsessions: being a dark Jew among golden Goyim; a vulnerable male among predatory females; a deficient son to loving parents; a dilatory arrival at the gates of maturity. In this and his next novel, The Professor of Desire, there is much that is witty and much that is touching, but it is the feeling of claustrophobia that emerges most strongly….

In The Ghost Writer the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, a young and promising writer of short stories that sound conspicuously like those in Goodbye, Columbus, speaks admiringly of Lonoff, the established older author whom he is visiting at his Berkshire hideaway: "I loved him! Yes, nothing less than love for this man with no illusions: love for the bluntness, the scrupulosity, the severity, the estrangement: love for the relentless winnowing out of the babyish, preening, insatiable self…." It is, alas, precisely Roth-alias-Zuckerman's "babyish, preening, insatiable self" that inhabits the center of the novel and directs the proceedings. The Ghost Writer testifies more to need and craving than to aspiration or risk; the motives propelling a young writer are explained to us by the older writer he has become. I suppose the novel can be read as a story about the conflicting allegiances to Art and Life, and the betrayals involved therein. Unfortunately, this is never really attended to by the plot. What we get is a handful of perceptions about domestic trauma and artistic imperiousness, and some vintage dialogue….

Even Roth's celebrated problematic Jewishness gets a rather tired nod here in the form of Zuckerman's fantasy involving Amy Bellette, a young assistant of Lonoff's whom he envisions as a resuscitated Anne Frank.

The Ghost Writer is a slight book about almost-major themes. It seems to me that Roth has his finger on a truly compelling dilemma—that of divided personal and intellectual loyalties—but that he confines it to a very small arena. Instead of opening it up to the stratagems and demands of the world out there, he has lingered with the battles that are familiar to him and to us. It is time that he dared to move on. (p. 19)