SOURCE: Hamilton, Ian. “‘OK, Holy Man, Try This’.” London Review of Books 22, no. 12 (22 June 2000): 36-7.

In the following review, Hamilton considers aspects of The Human Stain, musing over which elements in Roth's writing are possibly autobiographical.

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, shame-faced Jewish boy were to extol the joys of masturbation?

And what if we, Roth's readers, could join in and ask, for instance, what if an earnest young Jewish novelist of...