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In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years for the entire work of the recipient.
A book with this title just had to be written, and who is better qualified (if not Norman Mailer?) than Philip Roth, who's been doing his damnedest ever since Goodbye Columbus got the National Book Award back in 1959 when Ike was President. And what could be the topic but that ex-favorite National Pastime - what every healthy American boy did Sunday afternoons before the advent of football and dope. The book is the purported history of the demise of the Patriot League, told by an Irish (natch) sportswriter name a' Word Smith, whose endless alliteration makes Joyce look like a slouch - centering on the Exile of the Chosen People, the Ruppert Mundys (Rupe-it, in New Jerseyese) who in the bleak war years (that's World War Two) had a one-legged catcher, a one-armed right fielder (catches the ball, sticks it in his mouth, throws off the glove, takes the ball out of the mouth, throws to home), a midget pitcher, a fourteen year-old 92 pound second bagger. . . possibly part of the Commie conspiracy to destroy the League, hence baseball, hence America. Truth told by Word Smith from the confines of his old-age home, where he competes with superstars Melville, Twain, and Hawthorne in writing the you-know-what. A self-conscious savage satire of the land of apple pie and wheaties, plus occasional foul tips at literary tradition from Gilgamesh on up. As for the G.A.N., it is as much a dream as the 500 hitter, a goal made mythical by an arbitrary set of rules for a game which we (both writers and readers) now find tiring. (Kirkus Reviews)
