Is Zuckerman Unbound a success? The answer, unfortunately, is no. What Roth has always done well, he does as scintillatingly as ever. His dialogue rings true; his prose is crystalline. His talent for the outrageous flourish is as devastating as ever…. If nothing else, Zuckerman Unbound is dependably funny.

As deftly as any other writer, Roth can also capture a sense of psychic claustrophobia, the feeling of being trapped because one is a member of a family, or a success, or a Jew. Perfect strangers, as well as unloved relatives, presume that they understand Zuckerman, that he in turn will be automatically sympathetic to them and will feel indebted because of a label someone else has affixed to him…. In The Ghost Writer, Roth quoted Anne Frank's diary despairingly: "The time will come when we are people again, not just Jews."

But Zuckerman Unbound fails ultimately, and Roth...