—Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night here would American literature be without him? The fierce intelligence; the unbridled imagination; the merciless eye; the magisterial voice Philip Roth, archivist of that lost Jewish Arcadia, Weequahic, New Jersey; anthropologist of the modern Jewish identity; scourge of self-satisfaction, petti ness, vulgarity, greed, piety, sentimentality and cant. To all his acolytes—defiant outsiders and self-styled mandarins adrift in a shallow Panglossian culture—Roth looms like a secular Prophet, smiting the Philistines in Goodbye Columbus; mortifying the ethnocentrists in Portnoy's Complaint; mocking the Voluptuary in the Kepesh novels; skewering his hysteri cal, self-righteous critics in Zuckerman Bound; dissecting the anti-Semites on the one hand and the Zionist chauvinists on the other in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock; and most recently, in American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, exposing America's bedrock individualist creed as gossamer that the rootless, self-made man clutches at his peril. Roth registers our grievances, vindicates our arguments, diminishes our enemies, reflects our sentiments, and affirms our outlook. And by transforming our common experience into a scripture of Art, he sustains us in exile. I shud der to imagine our letters without his audacious vision. Fortunately, I don't have to. Our Bard already has. In The Plot Against America, his twenty-third work of fic tion, Roth pre-empts himself or rather, the nurturing world from which his dauntless authorial self sprang. Through the prism of a shadow American his