I had only to read [the] two opening sentences of "The Ghost Writer" to realize—with a long sigh of anticipated pleasure—that I was once again in the hands of a superbly endowed storyteller. That echo of the beginnings of a dozen great Russian tales … reassured me that Philip Roth is still exhibiting the good form that he recovered after "The Breast" and a couple of other aberrations. Whatever one may feel about the limitations of his vision and humanity as a novelist, the voice that Roth developed for his first-person narrations—notably "Portnoy's Complaint," "My Life as a Man" and, recently, "The Professor of Desire"—is surely one of the most distinctive and supple in contemporary American fiction. It is a voice of remarkable range, accommodating sentences of almost Jamesian convolution and allusiveness with sudden ejaculations of street language, comic hyperbole with ironic understatement, tones of...