In this funny and chilling novel, the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, and the subject is the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman, one of those implacable American moralists whose "goodness" is a terrible disease. When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.
Author
Witty and ironic fiction of noted American writer Philip Milton Roth includes the novels Portnoy's Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997), and The Human Stain (2000). He gained early literary fame with the collection Goodbye, Columbus (1959), winner of National Book Award of 1960, cemented this fame with his bestseller, and continued to write critically-acclaimed works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The novels of Zuckerman began with The Ghost Writer in 1979 and include winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In May 2011, he won the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip\_...
