SOURCE: "Recruiting Raw Nerves," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXIX, No. 4, March 15, 1993, pp. 109-12.

[A prizewinning novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist, and critic, Updike is one of America's most distinguished men of letters. Best known for such novels as Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), and Rabbit Is Rich (1981), he is a chronicler of life in Protestant, middle-class America. A contributor of literary reviews to various periodicals, he has frequently written the "Books" column in The New Yorker since 1955. In the following review, he remarks on theme and characterization in Operation Shylock and places the novel in the context of Roth's previous works.]

Some readers may feel there has been too much Philip Roth in the writer's recent books—The Facts, subtitled "A Novelist's Autobiography," with an eight-thousand-word afterword by the novelist's recurrent character Nathan Zuckerman (1988); Deception, an airy love tale, with wide margins, involving an American novelist called...