["I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting, or, Looking at Kafka"] is a masterful example of comedy. Roth uses cliché and fantasy, movies and spiritual longing, documentary and imagination, to construct a work which refuses to sit still. It is a dream-like marriage of opposing tendencies, texts, and "worlds," and in its striking way, it brings us closer to Roth's own life and style.

But the piece tells us much about the comic process. I believe that Roth implies a union in comedy. We laugh at a man slipping on a banana peel—or Kafka slipping into "normalcy"—because we connect events before and after the fall. There must, in fact, be a fall, an unbalancing which "dislocates" usual positions, roles, visions, but it cannot dominate the action; if it were to be "all," we would be merely horrified. We laugh, however, when we think of (con) sequences, contexts—for example, Kafka as Hebrew-school teacher—and we bring things together.

Therefore, comedy is wise. Surely, when we perceive that "accidents" can happen, we appreciate even more the usual "machinery" of life—we affirm normality, hoping that it can last. Comedy offers faith, finally, in routines of behavior, daily rituals, comforting returns.

"Looking at Kafka" is thus a comic work about comedy. It is "reflective," mirroring its themes in its actions (styles). It helps us to know Roth, Kafka, and ourselves as "normal" readers, implying as it does that the lines usually drawn to separate subjects are indeed narrow. It fuses criticism, life (history), and fiction, and it demands our close attention. (p. 275)