SOURCE: "Look Homeward, Ira," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLI, No. 5, pp. 24-5.

In the following review, Towers praises the absorbing story in Roth's Mercy of a Rude Stream, but complains that the structure is disjointed and the narration of the older Ira is intrusive.

The oddity of Henry Roth's career keeps getting in the way as one reads Mercy of a Rude Stream. Had he written a number of novels during his eighty-seven years, one could try to place the new work by comparing it with the others. But we have only a single precocious masterpiece, Call It Sleep, published sixty years ago, and now generally recognized as the most moving and lyrical novel to come out of the Jewish immigration to America before and after the turn of the century. Even if we take account of the history of Roth's by now famous...