SOURCE: A review of Shifting Landscape and Call It Sleep, in New Republic, Vol. 198, No. 4, January 25, 1988, pp. 33-7.

In the following review, Alter discusses Roth's Call It Sleep and asserts that his new volume, Shifting Landscape "provides the outlines of a spiritual autobiography."

The haunting question about Henry Roth remains his half century of silence after the publication of Call It Sleep in 1934. Call It Sleep, which, as I have just discovered, is one of those rare books that actually improves with rereading, exhibits the perfect pitch of genius in all the play of its invention and stylistic energy; it clearly belongs among the few great American novels of the 20th century. But this was not a case, as happens frequently enough, of a promising or even brilliant first novel that has no sequel because its author runs out of steam, because he has said the one thing...