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Who’s writing like this now? I don’t mean who’s the most esteemed or problematic or best or most “important,�� whatever any of that means. But who, today, is writing circles around the rest of us? Whose mastery of the English language is so overwhelming that every page astonishes on that basis alone, never mind all those niggling themes?

Roth’s words sizzle and sing, never slow down, race forward, trembling with life, and within that irresistible momentum, it is as if he can do anything, take you anywhere, bury the truth or shout it, bury the past or live it, bury the future or make it. Time is putty in his hands. He says the maddest things, the funniest things, the most preposterous, horrifying, real, unreal things. Is this the story of white America in the 20th century? Or is it a preposterous farce, totally detached from reality?

Merry, the young woman at the novel’s heart, is not a real person, not a flesh and blood human being. No lesser writer could possibly have recovered from that—that decision. The Swede, our protagonist, is not a real human being either. This fact is broadcast loud and clear from page one, and fooling you into forgetting it is one of Roth's most staggering tricks. These characters are not symbols either, not generations personified—although Roth toys with that possibility, like a cat batting around a mouse it doesn't intend to eat. So what are we dealing with here? Anxieties personified? Phantoms of Americas past? Not real people, but reality made flesh? And then suddenly there they are, human beings! How wrong I was to doubt! Foolish, ridiculous, ungainly human beings. Astonishingly, Roth can more or less accomplish this—whatever this is—with any old side character in half a page. Astonishingly, what you think is a scene turns out to be nothing but incoherent ranting; then, what appears to be an incoherent rant turns out to be scene, vivid as technicolor.