When She Was Good

Description

Philip Roth's entire oeuvre - 31 books - to be reissued in electric new Vintage jackets for October 2016 When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her irresponsible, alcoholic father thrown in jail. Since then, Lucy has become a furious adolescent - raging against middle-class life and provincial American piety - intent on reforming the men around her- especially her incompetent mama's boy of a husband, Roy. As time rolls on, Lucy struggles to free herself of the terrible disappointment engendered by her father, and is forever yearning for the man he could never be. It is with scalpel-like precision that Roth depicts the rage, the hatred and the ferocity of feeling that soon takes hold of Lucy's life.

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for 'the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004'. Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award 'for a body of work ... of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose 'scale of achievement over a sustained career ... places him or her in the highest rank of American literature'. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Booker Prize. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.

Roth is a living master * New York Review of Books * When She Was Good, both its sustained theme and its detail work, is a step above most recent novels... Roth is a serious writer, willing to turn his face against fashion and the expected, and to take improbable chances' * New York Times * High, careful tragedy, nasty as life, and Roth emerges...as a Dreiser who can write! -- Stanley Elkin Compassion mingles with horror in a superb portrayal of a young woman's obsession with moral rectitude * Saturday Review *