There is no doubt now that Philip Roth is a canonical American author; the late flowering of his career in the 1990s especially has guaranteed him a place alongside DeLillo, Morrison and Updike as one of the great voices of late twentieth-century America. This book is principally dedicated to the later part of Roth's career, and therefore includes substantial and detailed readings of Sabbath's Theater (1995), the American Trilogy, and The Plot against America (2004), but it also accommodates valuable comment on Roth's first story, “The Day It Snowed” (1954), and Everyman (2006).

Brauner tries to situate Roth in relation to late twentieth-century American fiction, comparing his work at various points with that of Pynchon, Ellis, Elkin, and even Foer's novel from 2005, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Brauner's analyses are concerned with the ideological subtleties and complexities of Roth's narrative structures (interpreting them in terms of subjectivity, American self-fashioning and ethnicity), but they are also very attentive to Roth's aesthetic qualities, especially his diction, and show in almost every paragraph how word choice crucially informs our understanding of Roth's tact and intelligence as a stylist.

Brauner also has a very good eye for the succinct and apposite quotation from existing Roth criticism (from which he can quote copiously), and this helps to bring into focus important and provocative debates about the politics of Roth's fiction, and about the politics of its reception. The book also tries to do justice to Roth's visceral and provocative stories, and it does not flinch from addressing directly the most uncompromising aspects of Roth's fiction, observing during the interpretation of American Pastoral, for example, that there is “a lot of shit in Roth's novels” (163). Brauner argues that one of the things that makes Roth the Great American Novelist is that he “has consistently improved as a writer as his career has developed” (223). Is this a claim that could even be made on behalf of DeLillo, Morrison or Updike? This is a really useful book, and it makes compelling arguments for the status of Roth's fiction.