Don't be misled by the title - this urgent, profound novel is far from being the stuff of a 1960s TV sitcom. Within a year of his magnificent American Pastoral, Roth, for so long the brash chronicler of writerly ego and sexual angst (largely his own) sustains the elegiac tone of that novel and continues to write the story of America. Yet again, Roth's fictional alter ego, novelist Nathan Zucherman, acts as narrator and, more importantly, eager witness. Radio actor Iron Rinn, real name Ira Ringold, had been famous for impersonating Abe Lincoln. Ira, idealist, Communist and angry American Jew, is simple enough to be enamoured of rhetoric and a silent film star whose personal reinvention is based on betrayals. For a while Ira was also a mentor for the young Zucherman and introduced him to rural America. But the years have passed. Ira, a heroic figure but also a fallen public idol, is now dead. Zucherman shares the narrative with Ira's brother Murray, a former high school English teacher with a long memory. This is a spoken novel, a book of voices, and tone shifts. It is also a worthy sequel to American Pastoral, with which it shares the honours (alongside the 1986 The Counterlife) as the best of Roth, the most autobiographically-inclined major US writer whose late mid-career appears shaped by passion, reflection, self-knowledge and humanity.
