SOURCE: "The Indigenous American Berserk," in New Leader, Vol. LXXX, No. 9, May 19, 1997, pp. 18-19.

[In the following review of American Pastoral, Cohen critiques Roth's repetitive use of his character Nathan Zuckerman, but praises the author's narrative energies, claiming that age seems to have "enriched [Roth's] perspective."]

I suspect I am not alone among Philip Roth's many readers in finding the prospect of another installment in the Nathan Zuckerman saga about as appealing as a tax audit. Surely by now, at century's end, few depths remain unplumbed in this person fashioned in the sort-of-but-not-quite-though-pro-vocatively-similar image of the creator Himself. It's no accident that the best of Roth's recent books (and they are terrifically good), Patrimony and Sabbath's Theater, elbowed the ongoing tribulations of N. Z. aside to make room for more colorful, more dramatic, and ultimately more moving and revealing subjects—Herman Roth and that putzy poor man's Lear...