The constantly troubled interplay between “fiction” and “autobiography,” creativity and experience, in Roth’s corpus is what in systems theory is called the cut—the primary distinction—that initiates its very existence. At the same time, the making of this distinction implicitly posits a third position, a point of remove from which the initial distinction is made, from which its operations will be observed, and in which its terms do not necessarily apply. Observing this third space from yet another point of remove (call it the literary-historical perspective), Roth’s fictions can be seen for
...more
