ABSTRACT
As Zuckerman says, "Without fanaticism nothing great in fiction could ever be achieved" (AL 179). Fanaticism of the second order is Roth's blood, the pulsating current that drives him ever deeper into his subject, risking criticism, scorn, risking talk of unimaginativeness. But setting, tone, and style can be similar over and over again and still a new story is being told, a new direction taken, a new dream being given shape. Like Faulkner, turning back and back again to the South, to the legacy of the Civil War, Roth directs his scalpel to Judaism, to anti-Semitism, to the Holocaust over and over again. The obsession is the starting point, the first image, reformed and reformed, reaching out beyond its margins, grasping to it issues that transcend its seeming limits.
