[The Anatomy Lesson] is the finest, boldest and funniest piece of fiction which Philip Roth has yet produced—and that is quite something to say about the author of Portnoy's Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go. Perhaps because of the 'personal' nature of most of his work—and also perhaps simply because he is one of the half-dozen writers alive who make you laugh aloud—readers and some critics in this country have tended to underestimate the scale and nature of Roth's gifts. He has been treated as a Jewish-American farceur who took advantage of a good education to hoist his emotional confusions on a public eager to read about sex—so long as it was wrapped in the severe packing of ideas, and literary ideas, at that. My own guess is that his extraordinary combination of careful observation, unfettered fantasy and elegant discussion of a multitude of themes, make him unclassifiable as a writer, and this makes people nervous of overpraising him.
Though how much and for how long he has been compared to other writers, living and dead! Salinger and Mann, Kafka and Bellow, Chekov and Malamud have all been brought into service at one time or another in the attempt to pin him and cut him down. Because Roth has the skill to incorporate literary criticism within the body of his narratives, he is accused of intellectualising. The variety of his eloquence has told against him. It is a sad fact that well articulated imagination should elicit the kind of abuse which is usually reserved for objects of fear.
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