When She Was Good

Philip Roth rocks. My favourite is still The Human Stain, which I think is a masterpiece, but this earlier novel (published 1965) made pretty compulsive reading. Also, you sometimes get the feeling with his latest novels that he’s writing the same novel again and again, but this is different. There are fewer authorial tricks. The blurb promises: ‘In this mesmerising, funny, chilling novel, the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, the subject the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young girl.’ Which is pretty much what you get. But what makes it so compelling is that you really sympathise with the main character, and like her, although you can understand why by the end of the novel no one else can stand her.

In other news, the lovie is incommunicable right now, lost in Paul Auster. Mayber I should try him next. I’ve been stuck two thirds of the way through Umberto Eco’s Baudelino for three months now. I’m currently half way through Halldor Laxness’s Under the Glacier. Not really sure it’s my kind of thing, but it’s a pretty short novel, so I’ll let you know.