In fact, the corpse in Sabbath’s Theatre’s defiled grave, once a plump Yugoslavian woman named Drenka with an apparently inexhaustible sex life, manages to entice no less than three of her former lovers to visit her tomb in the middle of the night and ejaculate over her plot. But it is our eponymous lead Mickey Sabbath, a libidinous puppeteer, of all things, who makes a habit of these moonlit flirtations with necrophilia. ‘He came on her grave many nights’, Roth delights in telling us, just as some 30 years before the young Alexander Portnoy provided countless examples of his own self-styled depravity, and infamously violated a purple hunk of raw liver – found in his mother’s pantry and then served up, hours later, for the family dinner.

Does this mean that little has changed? Have 30 years of continuous writing offered nothing but a shift in location, a move from kitchen to cemetery?

No. The shift from liver to grave represents everything, in Roth, that has changed.

* * * * *

The Great American Novel. A cliché, a hope. A phrase that has long meant not an example but an ideal, not a history but a promise. Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn – the inevitable beginning of an incantation, a list of literary greatness. And as a list therefore an assurance that subsequent cases are coming. Readers and critics, keenly, capriciously, have devoted themselves to the quest. The Great American Novelist: the staple of literary reviews. And somewhere in the midst of them, Philip Roth has clung to the title.

It helps, perhaps, that Roth produced a prompt many years ago, his own subtly-named The Great American Novel. It helps too that critics like Sean O’Hagan in The Observer will offhandedly credit him with the triumph: ‘While newer talents like Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen have been praised for their attempts to create the Great American Novel for our times, Roth, without fuss or fanfare, has written four of them in the last decade.’

There has been fanfare, though. Roth has now won the Pulitzer, the National Medal of Arts, the Gold Medal in Fiction (the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as the covers of his recent novels are eager to explain). He has twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He will soon become the third living American writer to be published in full by the Library of America. With the backing of this – rather exhaustive – fanfare, the blurb on his most recent offering confidently equates him with William Faulkner and Saul Bellow.

Time itself has helped, of course. Sean O’Hagan above, perhaps unconsciously, dismissed ‘newer talents’ like DeLillo and Franzen, as if age were the prerequisite of greatness. But then much of Roth’s image for all his fawning critics is intimately concerned with longevity. With Bellow ailing, he is, undisputedly, the elder statesman of American literature – established, renowned, prolific, balding. And it is the very decades at his keyboard, the long italicised lists headed ‘By the same author’ in the opening pages of his books, that have apparently earned him the acclaim. Somewhere, somehow, Philip Roth came to the stage where Blake Morrison could end a review with the dumbfounded, rhetorical entreaty – ‘Isn’t it time they gave him the Nobel?’

* * * * *

What is the difference between a liver and a grave? The clue is Roth’s treatment, his motives, his tone. Even two miniature extracts, placed side by side, show the impact of Roth’s 30 years.

‘I believe that I have already confessed to the piece of liver that I bought in a butcher shop and banged behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. Well, I wish to make a clean breast of it, Your Holiness. That – she – it – wasn’t my first piece. My first piece I had in the privacy of my own home, rolled round my cock in the bathroom at three-thirty – and then had again on the end of a fork at five-thirty, along with the other members of that poor innocent family of mine.

Five months after her death, a damp, warm April night with a full moon canonizing itself above the tree line, effortlessly floating – luminously blessed – toward the throne of God, Sabbath stretched out on the ground that covered her coffin and said, “You filthy, wonderful Drenka cunt! Marry me! Marry me!”‘

The tone is the real distinction between the two passages, of course. Portnoy’s Complaint is uproarious, mischievous, deceptively mature. There is an enchanting mild chutzpah in the false confession, an honest matter-of-factness in the opening line, a charming self-disgust in that brilliant zeugma of the last. Even the frenzied grappling with pronouns – ‘that – she – it’ – is graced with the fretful humour of the whole. This is magnetic writing. Sex with a liver is a joke.

In Sabbath’s Theatre, in the second of the extracts, the prose is charmless. Roth is more concerned with the irreverent juxtaposition of his character’s coarse words and his narrative’s ‘throne of God’. The intimations of necrophilia – aiming at provocation, designed to be offensive – are offensive only in their laboriousness. Roth’s advocates would argue, I suppose, that Sabbath’s nocturnal trysts with a corpse allude to the fearful burden of mortality. Or they would argue that the humour remains, but that it is drier and that I have missed it. But what is there in Roth’s ‘damp, warm April night with a full moon canonizing itself’ to acquit him from the charge of taking himself too seriously? Where is the humour in ‘luminously blessed’? The tone, alas, is no longer ironic. Sex with a grave is no joke.

There is one, laboured, self-indulgent reason why Roth chose to have his character violate a tomb.

What does a grave have that a piece of liver hasn’t? Solemnity. Weightiness. Gravitas.

* * * * *

Philip Roth’s most recent novel, The Plot Against America, has quickly enjoyed the usual success. The New York Times has lavished it with devoted, almost parental attention. Even more cautious reviewers – few enough of those – have been loath to dismiss Roth. The Daily Telegraph, though wary, unsure, nonetheless had the grace to concede: ‘Roth’s lesser works are better than many others’ masterpieces.’

The Plot Against America rewrites American history. It is a fiction in the guise of a history. Charles A Lindbergh, renowned solo airman and probable anti-Semite, famous across the globe for completing the first solo transatlantic flight in May 1927 on the Spirit of St Louis, enters Roth’s fictional world with a surprise bid for the Republican candidacy in the presidential elections of 1940. In real life, Lindbergh wrote of Hitler as ‘a great man’, of the need to guard America against ‘the infiltration of inferior blood’, of his concern that too many Jews in one country ‘create chaos. And we are getting too many’. In Roth, Lindbergh campaigns across America with a strong anti-war message, flies a folksy solo tour of the nation in the iconic Spirit of St Louis, and in November defeats Roosevelt to become the president of the United States. The novel, which flits recurrently to ‘historical’ updates on the political climate, centres on the domestic drama of a family living in Newark, New Jersey – a family of four with the name of Roth, and a narrator in the form of a seven-year-old boy, who grandly introduces himself, a few pages in, with the words – ‘I, Philip, wasn’t yet born…’

This is, then, a fictionalised autobiography, a story with genuine people in its foreground and historical figures looming behind. It is Roth’s personal take on the old motif of ‘What if it happened here?’ The relatively few critics with reservations about The Plot Against America have tended to focus on the immediate plausibility, worried that Roth has failed to make us suspend disbelief and forget that Roosevelt ever won his third term. This – almost the lone criticism – is not a valid qualm. To Roth’s credit, his interest is more in the domestic, in the difficulties of a family strained by the political atmosphere, than in creating the credible origins of that atmosphere. It is hardly important that Lindbergh’s flying tours of America would clearly not be enough to secure a presidential campaign. The focus – at least, Roth’s intended focus – is on the dynamic called family.

There are, however, two rather fundamental flaws in The Plot Against America, lasting blemishes apparently unnoticed by the deluge of eager reviewers. Both spring from Roth’s treatment of history, and the first is chiefly stylistic. Michiko Kakutani, the famously acerbic critic at The New York Times, described the novel as ‘provocative but lumpy’, as if the ‘lumpy’ prose were only a secondary problem, and provocation per se were both positive and redeeming. To my mind, lumpiness is a flaw. In The Plot Against America, the need to combine the two narratives – the one domestic, the other ‘historical’ – seems to have forced Roth’s struggling prose into flatness, a lack of colour, and his monochrome writing suffers from trying to relate too much information with no apparent point and with little apparent charisma. It is as if in his keenness to play the ‘historian’ he has remembered nothing but documentation. Too often his prose simply descends into lists – so that he will spend pages, inexplicably, naming all the important guests at a wedding, and in agonisingly repetitive clauses: ‘To begin with, there were… Representing the city were… Among the distinguished educators attending the wedding were… Present as well were… From the State Assembly there was… From the District Court…’ – and then even, crushingly, ‘Absent…was…’ This is hardly even prose. These are minutes.

The Plot Against America has too great a deal of ‘history’, and too little literature.

There are touches of literature in The Plot Against America, but they are fleeting, ephemeral to the point of elusiveness. At one stage little Philip, whose cousin has lost a leg and is dangerously underweight, attempts to find out how heavy the leg itself might have been, ‘without success’, by weighing his own on the bathroom scale. Elsewhere, a young neighbour – who has just lost his father and whom Philip finds too clingy – prompts this dry reaction: ‘Since his father’s suicide, my aversion to him had grown stronger…’ In neither case is the writing incomparable, but these are moments of genuine conviction, outré but plausible insights from a perceptive author that we are grateful to have had put into words. And Roth’s humour is still there too: not the uproarious, hysterical humour of Portnoy’s Complaint but indeed something altogether drier, quiet and even sometimes poignant. So the Roth family visits Washington, DC, and stands reverentially in front of the Lincoln Memorial: ‘Gravely my father said, “And they shot him, the dirty dogs.”’ Roth adds the ironical inflection that the family awe springs as much from the architecture as from the fate of Lincoln, the man and statesman.

In fact, the Washington episode is the most successful part of the book. It comes early in the novel, with Lindbergh already in the White House but with only a vague threat of active anti-Semitism to tarnish the peaceful air. The burden of that fear is constantly overhead – literally, even, since the President takes a daily ‘little spin along the Potomac’ in one of his fighter planes, and a host of enthusiasts gaze up and and a chorus of cheers is raised at the sight of the great Charles Lindbergh, pilot and president and pal of Adolf Hitler.

But it is only in this episode that The Plot Against America works. And it works because the palpable dread the Roths suffer in Washington arises from a threat and perhaps not a reality, because the instances of genuine hostility need not necessarily mean a national trend. The tension is credible and interesting because the focus is still on the family. It is the family’s fear, and thus the family’s drama. But this brief flirtation with literature lasts no longer than a few days in Washington. Misguidedly, Roth moves away from this cusp of outright anti-Semitism, relinquishes that menacing threshold of persecution and descends, leadenly, into the architecture of persecution itself. The Jews of the north-east are forcibly relocated to Christian strongholds in the mid-west or deep south. Joseph Goebbels is guest of honour at the White House. And ultimately, in an almost farcically rapid, whirlwind of a finale, Lindbergh conveniently disappears from the sky and within a fortnight Roosevelt has been arrested, pogroms have broken out all over America, and even war-battered Churchill pities the nation that is now suffering the beginnings of mass civil war. In the space of five or six pages, it is the Kristallnacht of the Atlantic coast. Suddenly, Roth has rewritten himself as the Anne Frank of Newark, NJ.

The real problem with this conclusion is not the speed, nor the scale, nor the general implausibility of this grossly re-packaged history. It is the crudeness. And it is crudeness in the sense not of vulgarity or offensiveness – though the transplantation of a real human tragedy to the suburban America of Roth’s nostalgia might seem somewhat offensive – but in the sense that it is blunt, laboured, ham-fisted. This endgame, not the inception, is where the critics who took issue with Roth’s plausibility would have been right. The Plot Against America does not have the plot to justify its ends. The frantic climax to the Lindbergh administration is breathlessly dispatched, summarised in diary form (supposedly ‘drawn from’ newsreel footage) so as to remove the need for anything but a continuous stream of events. Roth never manages to reconcile his insistence on providing exhausting, static, even stagnant, ‘historical’ detail with the fact that he is fundamentally unconcerned about the path, the direction of his ‘history’.

The Plot Against America only ever has one objective in mind. Roth wants to pretend that America suffered the persecution of Nazi Europe. He wants to recast Newark as 1930s Berlin.

Roth wouldn’t have written this 30 years ago. In fact, he has effectively admitted so himself. The Ghost Writer, composed in the late 70s, was the first novel to feature Roth’s alter ego, the clone-like Nathan Zuckerman, and it contains the following lines of dialogue. Zuckerman is talking to his mother, who speaks first in this extract.

‘He only meant that what happened to the Jews – ’

‘In Europe – not in Newark! We are not the wretched of Belsen! We were not the victims of that crime!’

‘But we could be – in their places, we would be. Nathan, violence is nothing new to Jews, you know that!’

‘Ma, you want to see physical violence done to the Jews of Newark, go to the office of the plastic surgeon where the girls get their noses fixed.’

Something of a volte-face, then, has taken place in the interim. Roth seems to have forgotten Zuckerman’s righteous – and right – indignation. Unwittingly, he has anticipated and articulated, decades in advance, the very cry his newest novel ought to raise: ‘In Europe – not in Newark!’ Zuckerman’s exasperated shriek is staggered by the silliness of the idea: the word ‘Newark’ has the tone of an astounded, dismissive sneer. Who would ever try to equate Belsen with New Jersey?

And why does this author now make this the story of a young boy named Philip Roth?

The answer to this last question is the reason why Roth cannot reconcile his verbosity as ‘historian’ with his lack of interest in ‘history’. It is the cause of his novel’s two fundamental flaws. It is the difference between livers and graves. There is a point in The Plot Against America when one of Philip’s teachers suggests he has been suffering from ‘delusions of grandeur’. Roth’s disavowal is swift:

‘Not so. I wasn’t at all like Sandy [his brother], in whom opportunity had quickened the desire to be a boy on the grand scale, riding the crest of history. I wanted nothing to do with history. I wanted to be a boy on the smallest scale possible. I wanted to be an orphan.’

The one feature in these sentences that might be correct is the use of the perfect tense. Because whether or not the young Philip ‘wanted nothing to do with history’, the real Philip, retrospectively, wants everything to do with it. The denial, in other words, may not be ‘deluded’, but it certainly is grand. Even that haughty opening – ‘Not so’ – betrays the ‘grand scale’ on which Roth sees himself. Even that insistent string of pronouns – ‘I…I…I…I…’ – reveals Roth’s focus, his priority. The Plot Against America is an exercise, a vehicle for placing the author in the midst of an illustrious history, and so the tone, register, style, even syntax, are all unfailingly grandiose. ‘I, Philip’ is the subject of the novel. ‘I, Philip’ is its primary concern. For God’s sake, that tripled ‘I wanted’ is almost a Ciceronian tricolon crescendo.

The Plot Against America is not so much a fictionalised autobiography as a glamorised one. Its flaws, whether in style or in story, spring from its being laboured, contrived, moulded clumsily into a history that Roth sees as heroic – into a childhood not of leafy streets and high school football, but of persecution and fear. This, the latter, is supposedly the central emotion of The Plot Against America. ‘Fear’ is its first word. The phrase ‘perpetual fear’ crops up in its opening sentence and titles its closing chapter. But the problem is that this is a sort of glamorised paranoia – unnatural, forced, and fundamentally self-indulgent. It is not realistic. Philip has nightmares that his beloved stamp collection has been covered with the symbols of Nazism, that the name of George Washington has been replaced by the name of Hitler. But Philip is supposed to be seven. Implausibly, the horror of fascism has filtered through to his young mind, because for Roth the paranoia is noble, this terror is grand. As his prose reveals. When Roth trills on his epic crescendo, building towards his laboured climax, he clinches the end of sentence and chapter with the weighty sledgehammer of solemnity.

‘…and across the face of each, across the cliffs, the woods, the rivers, the peaks, the geyser, the gorges, the granite coastline, across the deep blue water and the high waterfalls, across everything in America that was the bluest and the greenest and the whitest and to be preserved forever in these pristine reservations, was printed a black swastika.’

He takes his ‘history’ very seriously in this novel, not because of an interest in history per se, but because the centre of the history is Roth himself. Seriousness is the self-portrait he wishes to paint. Hence the finale to his nightmare. Like a grave, a swastika has gravitas. Like the moon, Roth canonises himself.

* * * * *

There are several recurrent themes in Roth’s recent fiction. There is history – an awareness of the grand scheme of time; a focus on memory, on biography, on the slightly melancholy sensation of dominant nostalgia. There is America – at once a nation and a concept, an identity and a home – a word with the weight of an epic behind it. And there is writing – a consciousness of the task of the author and of his place in the sequence called the literary canon.

History, in Roth, is not only the appropriation and repackaging of an era that explicitly constitutes The Plot Against America. It is also the sheer sense of the past, reminiscence, the gravity of nostalgia. In American Pastoral, for example, the whole novel is approached from this backward-looking perspective, as Zuckerman attempts to piece together the history of his subject: ‘He wants something recorded. That’s why he’s turned to me: to record what might otherwise be forgotten. Omitted and forgotten. What could it be?’ The early chapters of the book centre around the author’s high school reunion, such that the long opening sequence of the novel is a fictional exercise in recollection. And moreover, as Roth has astutely noticed, ‘Everyone’s narcissism is strong at a reunion’.

The Human Stain again enacts, again through Zuckerman, the retrospective approach to the tale, though it also places itself in a sort of contemporary historical scheme, attaching itself to the meanderings of a genuine, known chronology:

‘Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine … in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism – which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security – was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot…’

And even in Sabbath’s Theatre, apparently free from the narrowing precision of a recognisable history, the narrative is often retrospective; the tense is overbearingly the pluperfect. Why the preoccupation with the retrospective? Perhaps a focus on the past is to some extent inevitable in an author well advanced in his career. But Roth’s concern for history seems always intimately connected with some sort of autobiography. The Plot Against America may be the most obvious example, but all the recent novels enact a form of fictionalised memoir – even the narrative of Sabbath’s Theatre cannot resist appropriating the prose and slipping into the first person. As Roth himself has written – and written, of course, rather grandly: ‘I was a biography in perpetual motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.’ History, in Roth, is forever a high school reunion. His narcissism is perpetually strong.

America, the word itself, is everywhere in Roth’s fiction. He is keen to remind us, whatever his guise, that he was ‘an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world.’ With its jarring over-emphasis, the clause reads like a microcosm of all Roth’s recent fiction, a constant pounding reiteration that his is an American drama. Because, for Roth, the word means much more than a nation. In his language, it is solemn, vaulting, significant somehow, even with no elaboration beyond its four short syllables. ‘America’, for Roth, has the proportions of an epic, and he seems to think its mere invocation is always enough to rekindle his gravitas: ‘All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore… Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began.’ And so not only is America a sort of deity in Roth, cited to impart to his prose an effortlessly weighty register, it is also closely connected to his own sense of identity, and an identity therefore characterised by this same gravitas. In The Plot Against America, for example, much is made of the fact that the real victims of the plot are ‘American citizens who happened to be Jews’, to emphasise that being Jewish is an identity, but being American is the primary one. Hence the banging insistence of the lines quoted above (the ‘American child of American parents…’). And yet Roth’s identity is never really primarily American – although he rarely stops mentioning it – just as he claims here it is not primarily Jewish. His identity is rather his own sense of self. Why else does Roth ally himself so fervently to ‘American’ – the word he believes has significance? He may have wanted to write a book about being American or being Jewish or being scared. But he has written a book about being Philip Roth.

Roth’s recent fiction always has a writer-figure at its core, for the same reason it tends to delve into history or allude to America. The literary personae at the centre of all Roth’s recent novels are kept at a slight remove from the real writer himself. As with autobiography, as with identity, the gap affords Roth the chance to turn the ‘author’ into a subject. It gives him the opportunity to illustrate himself.

Consciousness of the feat of writing is prevalent in his fiction. This is more than the inevitable natural awareness of the act of writing: in Roth, there is always an active literary persona at his novels’ vocal centre, always, at some slight remove from Roth, a writer-figure controlling the narrative. In The Plot Against America, obviously, the narrator shares the name on the cover of the book, but since it is patently a fiction (the cover feels the need to proclaim it ‘a novel’) this is only a strange version of the real Philip Roth. In American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and I Married A Communist, the narrator is Nathan Zuckerman, who is deliberately crafted to be the almost indistinguishable twin of Roth – the same past, same present, same style – and who yet has a different name and a host of different stories to tell. Even Sabbath’s Theatre, in which the narrative is third-person and the voice propounding it unidentified, has an eponymous main character with an acute awareness of literature and a self-conscious control of his text. Mickey Sabbath speaks regularly in quotation – ‘Uncircumcised dog! Smite him thus!’; he compares all of his lovers to Shakespearean heroines, contrasting Ophelia with Miranda with Rosalind; he tries at times to be something of a critic – ‘V Woolf…an overbred English parody of a borzoi, effortlessly superior, as only the English can be, to all her inferiors, who never took her clothes off in her life’. He even finds, apparently, titillation in literary text: ‘I was reading Conrad. A guy on board had given me the books. I was reading all that stuff and jerking myself off over it. Dostoevsky… Rascal Knockoff.’ Sabbath casts himself – glamorises himself – as Lear: he traipses along the Manhattan grid reciting ‘I am a very foolish fond old man’. Sabbath is often aloof, bombastic, glib – like Roth. One of his lovers despairs, ‘Of course you outsmart me, you outsmart everyone, outtalk every–’ which Sabbath, of course, immediately interrupts. Mickey Sabbath is not quite Roth. But only not quite.

Famously, funnily, in Portnoy’s Complaint, our hero utters a memorable shriek: ‘Doctor, my doctor, what do you say, LET’S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!’ But again, in The Plot Against America, Roth seems to have forgotten the advice of his erstwhile incarnations. His fiction has too little id. It has all been hijacked by ego.

* * * * *

Egotism, needless to say, is not a literary crime. Arrogance to some degree is probably almost inevitable: there is nothing inherently modest in the act of writing books. But the problem with Roth’s ego is that it tarnishes his prose. Story and style are commandeered to paint the gloss onto its author.

‘I, Philip’ has the register of an epic. It is a sort of self-invocation; it seems to preface a soaring address, like ‘I, Caesar’ or ‘I, Zeus’ – or ‘I, Claudius’. This is the weakness of Philip Roth’s writing. It is a hunger to paint his self-portrait with the brushes of seriousness, gravitas, solemnity, sheer magnitude. It is the constant attempt to recast himself within an epic mould.

The consequence of ‘I, Philip’ is a mockery of the sentence. Roth’s efforts to reach the elevation of epic simply force every other clause into a farce of crescendo or climax or length. There are sentences in the recent novels with well over two hundred words between full stops. Most tend to read like the vaulting peroration of a final climax, the emotional close of a novel, perhaps – and yet they are here in every paragraph, pieced heavy-handedly together from a great mass of sub-clauses with a liberal spray of punctuation. They are sentences that suffocate with the volume of their words:

‘”Oh, cookie,” he said, and at just the moment when he had understood that the summer’s mutual, seemingly harmless playacting – the two of them nibbling at an intimacy too enjoyable to swear off and yet not in any way to be taken seriously, to be much concerned with, to be given an excessive significance, something utterly uncarnal that would fade away once the vacation was over and she was in school all day and he had returned to work, nothing that they couldn’t easily find their way back from – just when he had come to understand that the summer romance required some readjusting all around, he lost his vaunted sense of proportion, drew her to him with one arm, and kissed her stammering mouth with the passion that she had been asking him for all month long while knowing only obscurely what she was asking for.’ (American Pastoral)

All of Roth’s recent fiction often sounds like this. Sabbath’s Theatre, ironically, mocks both Woolf and Joyce, but both are writers who can ably tame a long and fluent line (consider the fourth sentence of To The Lighthouse). Roth cannot manage this length. He cannot control the undulation, the breathlessness or the tone, so he simply piles one clause on top of another, performing a sort of exercise of apposition, a game with the limits of punctuation. This is the portrait painted by gravitas. This is Roth’s self-canonisation.

‘The disruption of the anticipated American future that was simply to have unrolled out of the solid American past, out of each generation’s getting smarter – smarter for knowing the inadequacies and limitations of the generations before – out of each new generation’s breaking away from the parochialism a little further, out of the desire to go to the limit in America with your rights, forming yourself as an ideal person who gets rid of the traditional Jewish habits and attitudes, who frees himself of the pre-America insecurities and the old, constraining obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal among equals.’

Yet this is a sentence that is easy to write – even for a writer whose understanding of seriousness is that it is equivalent to length, that seriousness is best conveyed through quantity of words, through volume of prose, through bulkiness of text, that it in fact is ideally imparted through the greatest possible number of clauses, clauses simply fumbled together with a multitude of commas and a minimum of grace – and a mention perhaps of America, just name-dropped for good measure – clauses, indeed, hanging onto each other with nothing but lumbering repetition, repetition that catches its reader after each comma and every dash, catches him just as there was hope for his saviour, the full stop – yes, easy to write, for any writer, but always harshly inelegant.

The Great American Novel?

The grating American novel.