SOURCE: "An East-Side kid," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4743, February 25, 1994, p. 20.

In the following review, Leader proposes that in Roth's Mercy of a Rude Stream "The author wishes to recreate a world now lost, one defaced by the earlier novel's 'artistic' distortions, a product of complex personal and political needs."

The stream in question is Henry Roth's life: "rude" because materially impoverished as well as harsh, a life of immigrant slums and the coarse intimacies of crowded tenements; "merciful" because by returning to it as a source of art, after decades of "literary desolation", Roth the novelist at last regained his voice, was released from the most striking instance of writer's block in modern American fiction. Roth's block, like Wordsworth's "long continued frost" (a mere blip or glitch in comparison), dissolves in a work of epic autobiography: A Star Shines over Mt Morris Park is but the first...