Roth seems to me the most gifted novelist now writing, at least if one puts a stress on tradition in using the word novelist. He translates his intelligence and his feelings into the terms specific to serious fiction, with more firmness than Bellow, more richness than Mailer, more patience and steadiness and taste and tact than anyone else….

[Roth's] stories are full of beautiful insights into books and authors, into the business of teaching and criticizing, and into living with works of literature over time.

I know no other novelist, for instance, who makes the discussion of books such a valuable part of his story's action—with critical comments quite substantial in themselves and yet not an obstacle to the flow of dramatized life. These comments are appreciation rather than analysis—much less exegesis—but they are none the less critical in the best sense. And if this is possible because so much of his novels' action takes place between different parts of the protagonist's mind, nevertheless it is dramatized life—and there are more external exchanges. (p. 156)

[In] The Professor of Desire, David Kepesh goes to Prague largely because he is devoted to Kafka, visits the latter's home, discusses him with a Czech professor (himself devoted to Melville) and finally dreams about him. In the discussion he has talked about his own sexual impotence, and interpreted The Trial, as a story of similar sexual oppression. (The Czech professor, who suffers the political oppression of State communism, interprets Moby Dick in terms relevant to that suffering.)…

It is, typically, a presence and a contrast that are evoked each time. (p. 157)

[It] comes as no surprise that Roth is unusually susceptible to literary influence, which means, to some degree, literary fashion, and leads, in some cases, to disaster. Thus The Great American Novel (1973) is an attempt to write like John Barth…. Barth's mode was not indeed right for Roth, but his susceptibility to influence does not always lead him to disaster. Sometimes it leads to success, as we have seen and most often it stamps individual works with their special character. (p. 158)

Perhaps Roth's cultivation of his susceptibility to influence, and the weaknesses it brings, are more obvious than the strengths. But it seems to me that Roth consummates and combines the tendencies of … other writers, and produces a classical concentration of the literary imagination of our time. As I read him I find Salinger combined with Mailer, and Nabokov combined with Malamud, and I feel I am getting the best of each of them—when Roth is at his best. And it strikes me as a significant coincidence that a gifted novelist should cultivate this particular gift just when a school of criticism was arising which focused its attention on "the anxiety of influence."

It is perhaps notable that it was certain contemporaries, rather than Flaubert, Mann, James, or other of Roth's oracles, whom I was reminded of, who are for me the relevant surround to his work. Those grander and as it were more official sponsors I feel as living presences only in reading When She Was Good, 1967, (the least successful of his serious novels, though an interesting intention). There one can feel Flaubert and James, standing to the left and right of the author's chair, and bending over his shoulder to read each paragraph he completes.

But their absences or their distance from his other works fits in, as a part of Roth's treatment of the general theme, the grandeur and misery of ideas, the comedy and tragedy of their influence and non-influence upon behavior. (p. 159)

[However, it is the] comic, and earthy, and bawdy strain of his native [Jewish] culture, so unlike the austere, the noble, and the exquisite artists he admires, which Roth employs in his fiction to set it at a distance from its 'classical' sponsors.

All this, of course, Roth is perfectly aware of, draws our attention to, makes use of…. [But how] can any writer be so in tune with Mann, Woolf, James, and still so raucous and raunchy in word and deed? Even more, how can any writer pass so surefootedly and unembarrassedly from one to the other? No English novelist has ever been able to do that. Roth's work does reveal some of the dynamics and the limits of the process (his heroes are deeply upset by other people's vulgarity, and their vigour of language finds only a feeble counterpart in their behaviour). But it is nevertheless a wonderful achievement, and a vivid case of his interest in the limited powers of 'ideas' and 'literature'.

Roth's world of vulgarity is Jewish. To be a Jewish child, however, an experience Roth makes much of, is to grow up in a world of refinement. His heroes' families are the heart of all refinement…. [Roth's hero] grows up, as Jewish, with a map of life in which areas of refinement and vulgarity were marked off from each other clearly, but were not at war with each other. (pp. 160-61)

But Roth's work also records a rebellion, an exasperation with, a blasphemy against, [the piety of being Jewish]. That has seemed, especially to Jewish readers, the main thrust of his work, from Goodbye Columbus on. The story "Epstein," for instance, is built around the scene in which the father stands naked before his wife and child, his genitals apparently marked with venereal disease; a scene which outrages the piety taught in Leviticus XVIII against 'uncovering the nakedness' of a father.

Roth has always claimed that there was nothing anti-Jewish in this, nothing more than the artist's need to find pungent means of expression, and that seems plausible to me. On the other hand, that artist's need is, in our present phase of culture, for a pungency offensive to piety; to be an artist is to be in a state of inflamed exasperation, and it is not philistine to sympathize with those who protested.

However, from Roth's point of view, he was in those days socially pious himself because in sympathy with his society's criteria of seriousness. The big fact of his development, as he describes it, has been that he came to doubt even those criteria. In his early work, he tells us, he was always trying to be mature and responsible, to be manly, in whatever he wrote. (p. 162)

It is, nevertheless, in terms like manliness that Roth's heroes continue to measure themselves, despite his attempts to escape them. In an interview he said that his work changed with Portnoy, because of an increased responsiveness to what was unsocialized in himself. And Tarnopol tells Karen Oakes that now he's been broken by Maureen, he'll take Genet, Miller, and Celine as his literary heroes, and write like them. But he realizes immediately after that he is sensitive to nothing so much as to his moral reputation. And Roth's later work, including The Breast and The Professor of Desire, has a strain of moral suffering that sounds deeper than anything else. (p. 163)

Roth's career … is a vivid case of the changes that have come over American literary culture from the 50s to the 70s. But it is also a vivid case of continuity, for if his 'desire to be good' was replaced by a 'desire to be bad', both are there, in conflict, from the beginning. His first autobiographical hero, Gabe Wallach in Letting Go, is full of that conflict. And its terms are not so different in Professor of Desire, though the protagonist is much battered, saddened, almost silenced.

To place him evaluatively, I should put Roth beside Bellow, an author he much admires and much resembles, for Bellow too is an artist of conscience and comedy, with political responsibilities and autobiographical tendencies. One crucial likeness is between their senses of themselves as over-privileged, burdened with others' love or envy, too lucky by half. (This is a leading trait of all our Jewish novelists' heroes, and the crux of this genre of fiction.) Roth seems to me demonstrably the better in his handling of this central theme. In Bellow there is a softness of self-definition, a queasiness of self-love, which spoils a good deal. Roth's superiority is in fictional taste (in knowing what to omit) in the richer realism of his specification, and in the firmer personal centre to the extravaganzas of fantasy and the structures of reasoning. All in all, it seems to me, Roth is the central novelist of his generation, the one who sums up and dramatizes our central concerns. (pp. 167-68)