After a seriously sluggish start, this turned into my favorite Roth so far. The resonances with today’s politics, the presentation of multiple points of view, the personal tragedies, the intellectual coming of age and failure to fully arrive, the novel’s construction was a deft threading of the personal and the ideological.

I marked so many passages but this one bears some updating:

“McCarthy understood better than any American politician before him that people whose job was to legislate could do far better for themselves by performing; McCarthy understood the entertainment value of disgrace and how to feed the pleasures of paranoia. He took us back to our origins, back to the seventeenth century and the stocks. That’s how the country began: moral disgrace as public entertainment.”

We have passed from that world into one that harks even further back in time. A significant portion of the American people have moved on from the stocks to the coliseum. They cheer for the amoral emperor to feed the righteous to the lions.