SOURCE: Levi, Jonathan. “Reading Lessons.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (25 November 2001): 1.

In the following review, Levi contends that the conversations, letters, and essays collected in Shop Talk provide insightful glimpses into the careers of important postwar writers, particularly into Roth's motivations and literary inspiration.

Philip Roth spent much of the '90s writing a series of sharp-edged novels that probed the darker dynamics of American life. Shop Talk arrives not so much as a coda to this project but da capo—a return to the first measures of his writing life, a playing through from the beginning of the obsessions of a 40-year career. The 10 conversations, letters and essays that make up the book not only give fascinating glimpses of some of the deans of postwar literature but also provide a working diagram of the very engine that makes Roth run.

A reader of Roth's 1993 novel, Operation Shylock...