Professor Donald Weber writes on JBooks.com:
Feeling uprooted in London almost 20 years ago, [Philip] Roth himself spoke harshly of his experience as a de-territorialized‚ Jewish writer-intellectual living half of each year in England. As he explained in a 1988 interview, in conjunction with the publication of his autobiography, The Facts, a what’s driving [British] society isn’t dramatized with anything like the turbulent intensity that animates America… the intensity that’s generated by the American historical drama of movement and massive displacement, of class overspreading class, region overtaking region, minority encroaching on minority. Startlingly, just a few years later, the emergence of a vibrant cosmopolitan landscape whose center is multicultural London belies Roth’s premature judgment. Indeed, contemporary Britain now hums with a rich aural mix: an array of diverse voices, conjured by writers who take the vexed, yet often comic, story of global migration and new-world adjustment as their subject.
