> Read _American Pastoral_ last week. Does anyone else out there measure up
> to Roth?
As a novelist Roth is hard to beat. The string of books he's written since Sabbath's Theatre -- including especially American Pastoral and The Human Stain -- seem unmatched in contemporary fiction for their sheer scope and ferocious emotional intensity. However, if we broaden out contemporary literature from just the novel their are a few writers who might be better: I'm thinking of Alice Munro, whose short stories always seem perfect; or John Updike, who tends to range farther than Roth, writing not just novels but also a lot of good literary and artistic criticism. The question, I think, is how central is the novel....