Perhaps It’s Not the Future of Book Reviewing..

….but this is pretty damn clever. (via)

Naturally pretty much the whole world is reviewing INDIGNATION right now – Christopher Hitchens at the Atlantic ain’t impressed, plus there’s the whole “anti book tour book tour” (to pilfer another’s wording) that Roth’s publisher Houghton Mifflin organized for yesterday – but a few things leaped out at me when I read the book not long ago:

• Since both EXIT GHOST and EVERYMAN portrayed the anger and crankiness of old men, it makes sense Roth would want to age-regress his next book.
• It felt like a reworking of an attempt to write the kind of bildungsroman he tried when he was actually young, or else it was a massive pisstake on the expectation of what a young man’s novel is supposed to be.
• Jason Biggs is, thankfully, too old to play Marcus Messner, otherwise his typecasting would be permanent and disastrous.
• Messner’s fellow college students would probably grow up to be like these guys.
• There was so much hoopla for Roth last year and this year, what’s going to be left over when THE HUMBLING is published next year?