Then and later, Roth liked to teach books in tandem, the better to demonstrate the different ways authors approach similar themes in terms of craft and moral point of view: Bowen’s Death of the Heart and Golding’s Lord of the Flies; Bellow’s The Victim and Malamud’s The Assistant. At Iowa, too, he made things easier for himself by assigning each student to teach at least one novel on the syllabus (an idea he might have retained from his bravura lecture on Mario and the Magician for Willard Smith’s class at Bucknell), which forced them to study the book intensively as well as work on their
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