Better for real things to be uncontrollable, better for one's life to be undecipherable and intellectually impenetrable than to attempt to make casual sense of what is unknown with a fantasy that is mad. Better, I thought, that the events of these past three days should remain incomprehensible to me forever than to posit, as I had just been doing, a conspiracy of foreign intelligence agents who are determined to control my mind. We've all heard that one before.

To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration focus devotion to the reading. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel American Pastoral which featured one of his best-known characters Nathan Zuckerman the subject of many other of Roth's novels.

writers of his generation: his books have twice received the National Book Award twice the National Book Critics Circle award and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. The Human Stain (2000) another Zuckerman novel was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. S.