Whatever else a story may do, its one indispensable element is the imagination's first premise: what if?… What if a petty clerk in Prague should awaken one morning to find that he has become an enormous insect, or what if Franz Kafka himself should survive his bout with tuberculosis in 1924, live long enough to have to flee the Nazis, and emigrate to Newark, N.J., just in time to become Philip Roth's Hebrew schoolteacher? Such is the premise of what is surely Roth's finest piece of short fiction, "'I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting'; or, Looking at Kafka."…

Here is an example of the writer pushing his premises as far as he can until some other consideration, some reality principle, pushes back. Franz Kafka can be kept alive long enough to get to Newark, but he can't be restored to confident sexual manhood…. To suppose otherwise...