When She Was Good

New York: Random House. Near Fine in Very Good+ dust jacket. 1967. 2nd Printing. Hardcover. 0394451872 . This book is in Near Fine condition and has a Very Good+ dust jacket. The book and its contents are in clean, bright condition. The text pages are clean and bright. The dust jacket is mostly clean and bright, but has one small tear with some beginning wrinkling to the top rear spine joint. "Much of Roth's fiction revolves around semi-autobiographical themes, while self-consciously and playfully addressing the perils of establishing connections between Roth and his fictional lives and voices. Examples of this close relationship between the author's life and his characters' include narrators and protagonists such as David Kepesh and Nathan Zuckerman as well as the character "Philip Roth", who appears in The Plot Against America and of whom there are two in Operation Shylock. Critic Jacques Berlinerblau noted in The Chronicle of Higher Education that these fictional voices create a complex and tricky experience for readers, deceiving them into believing they "know" Roth. In Roth's fiction the question of authorship is intertwined with the theme of the idealistic, secular Jewish son who attempts to distance himself from Jewish customs and traditions, and from what he perceives as the sometimes suffocating influence of parents, rabbis, and other community leaders. Roth's fiction has been described by critics as pervaded by "a kind of alienation that is enlivened and exacerbated by what binds it". " (from Wikipedia) .