On the evidence of his latest novel, The Ghost Writer,… Philip Roth continues to be a promising writer.

Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus, comprised a collection of stories and a novella. They were written in a voice that was mordantly funny, yet inflected with a quality of seriousness. It was uniquely suited to the lightly-borne anguish of Roth's fictional situations and capable of sustaining interest in the fairly specialized conflicts of which it spoke.

He was writing about American Jews—both the assimilated ones, who take the land of plenty in their well-heeled stride, and the bewildered ones, who look backwards to the insular, clearly-defined world of the shtetl—with the mixture of derision and affection that comes from the too-lucid understanding of a writer straddling two histories himself. The ancient and the new were juxtaposed in the title novella, Goodbye, Columbus, to startling effect; one saw how...