When Michael Bloomberg quoted Exit Ghost 7 weeks ago it merited lengthy coverage in the Times and terser coverage on Gawker, which is why I am surprised only one blogger has realized that the Eliot Spitzer story also quotes Philip Roth.
It might be because of my Jewish surname and my striving for an intellectual competence I can never quite achieve, or it might be because of his hypnotic sway over the lit crit establishment, but Roth’s novels have always held a magnetic attraction for me. I can’t remember ever liking one, but I also can’t remember a year I didn’t read at least one Rothian tale of sexuality and faux-intellectualism in the American metropole.
Roth has essentially one character: an outwardly compelling and inwardly divided Jewish intellectual with a weakness for sex and a desire to work changes in the world.
Last time our country was rocked by a sex scandal we got The Human Stain, a Clintonian apologia; now it’s even worse—the scandal is in suburban New York, Roth’s holy ground, and it concerns a powerful Jewish politician. How long will it be until Houghton Mifflin announces Mayflower?
