Author: Philip Roth
Start date: 28 December 2010
End date: 18 March 2011
What I Liked About It: The writing. What did I like about the writing? The vocabulary! So often writers restrict the vocabulary used to just the colloquial, which is fine, and it is still possible to be a good writer, doing this. But I like a challenge, and, even though some sentences were a little bit too peppered with negatives and subjunctives and other devices that clouded the meaning, most often the writing was just right.
The names Roth used were also amazing! Either he used the real names of people he knew in Newark (because the protagonist is himself), or he has a unique Dickensian talent for creating names. Shepsie Tirschwell, Longy Zwillman, Shushy Margulis are just some examples.
What I Didn't Like About it: Sometimes I felt I did not have enough knowledge of history, and the chronology of the relevant history (explained by Roth, of course) was unclear, to really get what was going on, politically. I still do not really understand politics.
Would I Recommend It? Only to somebody who has patience for reading. If you want a book that supposedly grabs everybody from the get-go and maintains it to the back cover (read: my interpretation of the general public's experience with The Da Vinci Code), that's not this book. It reads more like a well-written history textbook (of a fictional event) dissolved in a novel about a family that gets torn apart.
Rating: Four stars. (I can't remember how many stars - four or five - my rating scale originally had but I think I'll keep it at four.)
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