Here's a novella of slightly over 30,000 very plain words - Philip Roth's shortest book since The Prague Orgy - structurally straightforward, winnowed of syntactical excitement, sterilised of jokes, rhythmically muted, baldly plotted, low on confrontation, low on tension, low on brilliancies and generally low all round. Here, the writing temperature has sunk below even that of Everyman: it's prose as utilitarian as you can get without making the flatness of the style into an ostentation. It opens with a verdict, rapped out with judicial impatience: 'He'd lost his magic. The impulse was spent ... His talent was dead.' The text that follows is so shorn of obvious sorcery that you're tempted to read the first four words half as a challenge, daring you to think the verdict is autobiographical - a prophecy or a lament. Or a boast: the magic hasn't been lost so much as abjured, like Prospero's.

LRB 28 January 2010 | PDF Download