W.W. Norton; 912 pages; $40. Jonathan Cape; £30
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HILIP ROTH insisted he wasn’t a Jewish novelist. This was a strange protestation for an author whose subjects include overbearing Jewish parents and rebellious sons, circumcision, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and the diasporic condition (as well as unexpected uses for kosher liver).
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Nor, he maintained, was he an autobiographical one. Yet from first to last, Roth’s stories circle back to the corner of New Jersey where he grew up. He spent years trying to find a fictional form in which to analyse his combustible first marriage. Unusually, he once apologised for secretly recording a former lover on the phone and inserting her memories word for word into “The Human Stain”. Even when writing “The Plot Against America”, which imagines Charles Lindbergh’s election as president and the subsequent persecution of the Jews, Roth murmured to himself “Don’t invent, just remember.”