I was traveling a couple weeks ago and looking for a political fiction book to feed both sides of my brain. This looked like just the ticket. I tend to like fiction told as an alternative to actual fact. Like “What if Kurt Cobain and Princess Diana had met and fallen in love” or Nixon Carver. Unfortunately Philip Roth chose to write his so-called “novel” with a pre-pubescent boy as the narrator. While faithful to how a young boy would tell the story, it is completely disjointed and uncompelling. Often wandering aimlessly for page after page on boyhood fantasies or meaningless details that add nothing to the story. I resolved to stop reading it five or six times, but kept picking it up hoping it would get better. It never did. You learn nothing about anything anyone would care about and the characters are all self involved bores that I can’t gin up one ounce of compassion for. This one will sooner forgotten than the headlines in Sunday’s “Parade”.