Synopsis
The author of the greatest American immigrant novel, Call It Sleep, returns with this posthumous work.
The Barnes & Noble Review
For complicated reasons touching on, but not limited to, communism, incest, and sheer cussedness - and best left to Steven Kellman's terrific, fluent biography Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth - only well into his eighties did Roth write the first of an eventual four volumes in his epic second autobiographical fiction, Mercy of a Rude Stream. Roth's death in an Albuquerque hospital near his home in 1995 slowed his belated productivity not a whit, and the last two volumes were published soon after. Now, with publication of the likewise autobiographical An American Type, this late second flowering of Roth's prodigious talent may have finally reached its bittersweet, fitfully brilliant end. No one should mistake An American Type for an equal bookend to Call It Sleep, nor foolishly read it first. But the new book nevertheless has the kind of freshness and energy that long-awaited follow-ups are often said to have, but too rarely do - in this case, passages that rival the artist's early work for grouchy music and pure, grammar-stripping poetry.