Philip Roth's talent feeds off shame. Shame at bad faith, others' suffering, sexual failure (still worse, success); the shame of literature, and the distance between language and feeling; and shame at his own shell-less narcissism. The Ghost Writer is mainly about this last kind, but since literary ambition for Roth subsumes the question of his relation to the Jewish past, and his doomed craving for a warm, live muse, it takes in the others as well.

And it does so with bland economy, both of structure and style….

It's a lucid, elegant fiction, teetering on the edge of fable…. The writing is never less than pleasurable, and is often strikingly, locally persuasive. However, the superimposition of self-consciousness on self-revelation has a smug feel to it. If I wanted one word to describe the impression it leaves, it would be "finesse"—the sense that Roth is here palpating his writerly ego in too practised a manner, and is in danger of losing touch with the very power to offend, embarrass and engage that he is, shamefacedly, celebrating. He is (in? through? despite?) his self-mockery, too close to playing the great writer himself these days to be convincing about his guilt and gaucherie.