Shop Talk, Philip Roth’s collection of conversations with other writers and reviews of yet others work, has some moments of deep insight into questions of Jewish identity in Europe post-WW2, but never actually gets anywhere close to exploring what the title suggests it might: the process of writing. What is here is also not always very good – the conversations with people like Aharon Applefeld, Primo Levi and Ivan Klima are intellectually stimulating and challenging pieces – if under developed given their brevity – but some of the pieces, such as his brief exchange with Mary McCarthy really offer very little insight at all.

This book, then, really doesn’t have an audience. It’s not any good for learning about the craft of writing (there really is very little shop talk), it’s not comprehensive enough to give true understanding into the Jewish question in 1960s Eastern Europe so fails as a historical and sociological document, and for fans of Roth it offers almost no insight into his own working methods. What it is is simply a selection of brief snap-shots of the intellectual lives of novelists in the mid-to-late twentieth century; a collection that makes you want to dig deeper, scratch the surfaces they skate on. If you’re unfamiliar with Eastern European fiction of the time, it will offer you a great many new names to seek out, a social milieu worth exploring. What it won’t offer you is anything deep, or long lasting.