Roth´s portrait of the American way of life confirms what us

Europeans have always suspected: the American dream is but

a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.

Or as Talleyrand put it, a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce.

Because this is Salon.

Huh?

ROTH never much of a writer specialized in 'kvetching' about JEWISH STORIES from an imagined and boring pastiche of middle-class suburbia. Not as entertaining or original as BERNAND MALEMUDE or SAUL BELLOW - ROTH will soon be consigned to 'leftover' status of overdone greying brisket in most bookstores/libraries/book-clubs.

Secondly it's unlikely that the corpus of work from Roth will be consigned to the dustbin of history anytime soon. I bet freshly scrubbed Freshmen and Freshwomen in 20 years will say "Michael Chabon who?" I'm sorry you feel a need to shoehorn 'Jewish Writers' into quaint Yiddish stereotypes.

But I have to point it out because frankly, Salon doesn't even realize anymore when they're being antisemitic.

for both Roth and Chabon. Roth's self-seriousness can grind me into submission sometimes, which is why I gave up on anything Zuckerman -- but The Plot Against America showed he can still drill down to a young protagonist's viewpoint on the big questions and deliver a helluva story in the meantime. So I'll be picking this up soon.

Is it that you hate yourself, or you hate the art of writing?

Believe you wanted to try and write 'Yiddischa' sterotypes - but then again you confine yourself into such quaint uninformed analogies!!! Are youse a member of the ADL??

Trolls always bring down the average, but today everybody seems to be in a bad mood. Is it the stock market? The price of gas?

Reed Richards

I never have. I never had a reason to. I don't read self-indulgent philosophizing about my own parish, Irish Catholicism mixed with vaguely Protestant indifference, so I see nothing interesting about a self-hating Jew that would convince me to pick up a Roth book. I got annoyed at Woody Allen doing that decades ago, and Roth doesn't even pretend to be a comedian.

There are larger issues in this world than one's heritage, religion and genetics. Good fiction talks about and examines those issues. From what I've read, Roth does not write good fiction. Can someone offer me an argument why this pathetic loser should be on anyone's reading list? I'm open to an argument, but I don't think anyone can offer one.

Based on every other published review, Bayard appears to have read a DIFFERENT book, or no book at all or he has such a bizarre and unconventionally obsessive view of it, it's completely unique. I won't go into details which will just get deleted by the Brain Police, go to Amazon or Google and see for yourselves.

Explorations of Jewish-American identity either interest you, or they don't. I'm interested, so I read. That's not all Roth writes about, but it's a lot of it.

As for humor, Our Gang and Portnoy are two of the funniest books I've ever read.

Another self-indulgent fantasy about unstable and pathologically oversexed shiksas being unable to resist Roth's all-powerful semitic manhood. Oh, yeah, while he's being oppressed by and outsmarting bloodthirsty "WASPS" who live to destroy him. Because everybody except him is either: just like those vicious rubes in Winesburg, Ohio, or like his dumb dad back in the city. And he's super clever -- smarter and more sensitive than anyone -- which doesn't stop him from being cruel to shiksa women after they pleasure him. Because they deserve it. And did I mention he's sexually irresistible to shiksas? OK, I guess I did.

When Roth wrote this book the first time in 1959 and called it "Goodbye Columbus," he was a young man. His astonishing ego and serial prejudices, masquerading as some impassioned cry against prejudice, were slightly forgivable. But as time passed and he kept up the routine, finding oppression against himself and evidence of his own sexual irresistibility, well, everywhere, the schtick grew increasingly ugly. And, looking back, there's pretty good argument to be made that "Goodbye, Columbus" is just the story of an unlikable young man who is a very bad house guest.

SO 1957.

Ever since I read Claire Blooms book on her years with Roth (let alone his revenge on her in I Married a Communist)

I have made a point of studying his portraits of ladies

in his books and the humourless bore he is.

Probably the most misogynic writer of our time, an inveterate disciple of that German miser Weiniger of the early 20th century.

Roth´s critics always turn a blind eye to his extraordinary capacity of so much hatred. He pursues women as horribly as the Nazis pursued the Jews.

No Nobel prize to him please.