PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Keiron Pim’s elegant, detailed and judicious biography is the first comprehensive English-language introduction to an author whose astonishing literary talent consistently overrode the careless failures, debacles and staggering afflictions of his life ... Endless Flight is straight cradle-to-grave biography. The urge to give linear structure to a life that so often reeled and stumbled is understandable. Pim does a fine job of making his subject’s progress through the world legible ... The central part of Pim’s book contains lengthy disquisitions on the most important of Roth’s novels. Some of these synopses can feel a little protracted, but it’s these affecting, sometimes hallucinatory portraits of individuals and societies in crisis for which Roth is most remembered, and readers who don’t have time to turn to the originals will be grateful for them ... [A] substantial achievement.
Joshua Cohen
MixedNew Left Review (UK)Cohen evokes the bucolic campus world of this era with a fluent satiric touch, playing off trademark details...in a tone that shifts between semi-realist and wild slapstick. The dialogue is snappy and interspersed with snicker-ready, drum-roll-to-cymbal one-liners. Superficially, the story is often a sort of breezy hoot. But grave questions and menacing true-life figures lurk about the novel from its inception to the end ... The domestic scenes are intermittently funny and occasionally cruel, but often also feel facile—slick, period-piece rehearsals of mid-twentieth century American Jewish foibles ... From the moment their half-wrecked car pulls up, blocking the Blums’ driveway, all five Netanyahus display a boorish grab-bag of ugly Jewish stereotypes...such a cheap cartoon of the demonic tribe that everything about their characters is at once homogenized and trivialized ... Cohen is good at rendering the force of Netanyahu’s rhetoric about the eternal historical agon in which he envisions himself and his people as lead actors. Who could disagree that this approach is lethally deluded? But as a reflection on the political morass of contemporary Zion I’m not sure how far it takes us. For the father and the son are distinct in crucial ways, even if both men are reprehensible.
Frederick Crews
MixedThe New York Times Book Review... Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet ... Crews’s exceptional fluency in the source material allows him to integrate complex incidents into an impressively cohesive narrative. The usefulness of the aggregation would have been greater had Crews presented his story with more of that objectivity he finds so damningly absent in Freud ... Crews is so invested in denying Freud primacy for any of the ideas associated with psychoanalysis that have retained a jot of credibility, and offers such a paucity of larger sociohistorical context for a study of this scale, that in reading his account it is easy to imagine humanity’s understanding of sexuality and psychology as such was advancing quite admirably until Freud came along and thrust us all into the lurid dungeon of his own ugly obsessions ... The wholesale denigration of its founder is what we might expect in response to a personal betrayal of the highest order, such as only an idol can deliver. Paraphrasing Voltaire, if Freud didn’t exist, Frederick Crews would have had to invent him. In showing us a relentlessly self-interested and interminably mistaken Freud, it might be said he’s done just that.
