SOURCE: "Nicely! Nicely!" in London Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 9, May 13, 1993, pp. 20-1.

[In the following review, Turner speculates on Roth's motivation for writing Operation Shylock and other novels that feature a Philip Roth persona.]

If you are anything like me, you will find yourself having to fight off a sort of sinking feeling as the new Philip Roth comes thudding into your life. What If A Lookalike Stranger Stole Your Name, Usurped Your Biography, And Went Around The World Pretending To Be You? the jacket flap blares: oh God help us, here we go again. You know there will be a lot of paranoid self-justification, in which the author revisits crimes against Jewry, against wives and against women in general committed in the novels he wrote ten, twenty, thirty years ago. There will be references, veiled or otherwise, to Roth's personal life, to an insurance salesman father...