‘OK, holy man, try this’

Ian Hamilton

  • The Human Stain by Philip Roth
    Cape, 361 pp, £16.99, May 2000, ISBN 0 224 06090 2

Philip Roth likes, or has liked, to describe himself as a ‘suppositional’ novelist. Much of his writing practice, he has said, takes off from a ‘what if?’ What if Franz Kafka had made it to America and there lived on to become a New Jersey schoolmaster? What if Anne Frank had survived and found out about the publication of her diary from a chance reading of Time magazine? What if a man could actually become a breast? What if a decent, shamefaced Jewish boy were to extol the joys of masturbation?

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