I had only to read [the] two opening sentences of "The Ghost Writer" to realize—with a long sigh of anticipated pleasure—that I was once again in the hands of a superbly endowed storyteller. That echo of the beginnings of a dozen great Russian tales … reassured me that Philip Roth is still exhibiting the good form that he recovered after "The Breast" and a couple of other aberrations. Whatever one may feel about the limitations of his vision and humanity as a novelist, the voice that Roth developed for his first-person narrations—notably "Portnoy's Complaint," "My Life as a Man" and, recently, "The Professor of Desire"—is surely one of the most distinctive and supple in contemporary American fiction. It is a voice of remarkable range, accommodating sentences of almost Jamesian convolution and allusiveness with sudden ejaculations of street language, comic hyperbole with ironic understatement, tones of melancholy self-deprecation with bursts of satiric glee. It is a voice that inspires in me, at least, confidence that what follows will be entertaining, sharply observed, possibly a bit nasty, almost certainly provocative. If I am sometimes discontented, exasperated or frustrated at the end, the fault is not that of the voice. (p. 1)

"The Ghost Writer" is one of Philip Roth's best short fictions, but, like so much that he has written, the rich promise of its style and inventiveness is in part betrayed by miscalculations of tone and structure, by a cleverness that sometimes bites its own tail. One could look upon "The Ghost Writer" as a long short story stretched further by the insertion of chunks of material that do not absolutely belong; alternatively, one can see it as a truncated novel in which certain elements of great potential importance remain undeveloped and unassimilated. Enjoying (and admiring) Roth as I do, I wish the book had been half again as long. (p. 13)