In 1961, Philip Roth wrote of American reality, “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.” The daily newspapers, he complained, “fill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise…” Roth’s sense that actuality was exceeding fiction writers’ imagination (and throwing up real-life figures like Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn who were the envy of any novelist) would be echoed more than half a century later by writers of satire and spy thrillers
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