KIRSCH ON ROTH

Writing for Tablet Magazine, Adam Kirsch finds The Humbling "thinly imagined, with few surprises in plot or language."

The books he has produced since then, as he entered his 70s, can only be called late late Roth—or better still, endgame Roth, since they are a series of meditations on last things. In Everyman and Indignation, Roth's protagonists are actually dead, looking back on their lives from beyond the grave. In Exit Ghost, his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is impotent, which for a Rothian...