The Philip Roth Reader

I admire Roth for being able to discipline rage into something that makes us feel smarter just for reading it.

Who are the great baseball writers? Roger Angell, Bill James, George Will (eing a lifetime Chicago Cubs fan has to count for something). Oh yeah -- and Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint.

Portnoy's Complaint is, after all, a portrait of the artist as a young shark. He's constantly on the move; even if his body holds still long enough to lie on the analyst's couch, that brain is a perpetual motion machine.

Required reading: When She Was Good, which can be reduced, for those who prefer sound bites, to the story of a girl who had no choice.

I'll endure a dollop of political incorrectness for the sake of an insanely smart story; in this post-feminist world, I'm just that confident.

Bad novels happen to good people, and vice versa, and I honestly don't care what kind of a husband Philip Roth was as long as he wakes up every morning and goes to work.

In the summer between my freshman and sophomore year in college I got a postcard from a boy in my sociology class. It read something like this: "Please, read Goodbye, Columbus right now."

The story is such a familiar, valiant mess, or better, a sprawling but disciplined rendering of a mess; 661 pages, and I am starting to regret that it will end.