SOURCE: Bernstein, Michael André. “Getting the American People Right.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5069 (26 May 2000): 22.

In the following review, Bernstein contends that Roth provides richly detailed character portraits in The Human Stain and feels this novel effectively explores crucial points of American postwar history.

“Tell me something, is it at all possible, at least outside of those books, for you to have a frame of reference slightly larger than the kitchen table in Newark?” If the accusation sounds instantly familiar—and, at least about one phase of Philip Roth's own career, not entirely unfair—it is largely because Roth himself is voicing it with the outraged intensity that propels so many of his characteristic scenes. Here, for example, in The Counterlife (1986), perhaps Roth's finest novel up until then, the charge is hurled at Nathan Zuckerman, the fictional novelist whom Roth has called not so much his alter ego as...