SOURCE: Adams, Tim. “Clinton's Complaint.” New Statesman 129, no. 4485 (8 May 2000): 56-7.

In the following review of The Human Stain, Adams lauds Roth's exploration of American popular culture in each of his works, maintaining that there is a “supreme confidence” displayed in his writing.

It was only a matter of time before Philip Roth confronted the pressing question of his President's dick. Over the past five years, through the tragic heroes of an extraordinary trilogy of novels that culminates in this one [The Human Stain], Roth has set out to measure what America has become against what it once seemed capable of being. In American Pastoral, he examined the effects of the fragmentation of the family under the permissive pressures of the 1960s; in I Married a Communist, he analysed the fallout of McCarthyism and the shadow it cast on the American soul; and here he ignites his awesome righteous...