Hello. I'm Deborah Friedel. I'm a contributing editor at the London Review of Books,

and I'm here with the writer Adam Thurwell.

He's a novelist, most recently of The Future Future, and he's also written for the LRB, most

recently for the LRB about the writer Bruno Schultz. Adam, thank you for coming.

Not at all. It's wonderful to be here.

I met Adam a few weeks after I first moved to England almost 20 years ago.

And immediately we started having a conversation about the differences between British Jews and American Jews, the American Jewish novel versus the British Jewish novel versus the European Jewish novel.

So when the LRB asked me to do a podcast with one of our contributors,

I realized what I most wanted to do is continue the conversation we've been having for a very long time.

So I think often when we're discussing the 20th century big American novel, we find ourselves ending with a conversation

or a fight about Philip Roth. And I thought this time we would just start there.

So, Adam, Philip Roth is probably best known for his novels set in Newark, New Jersey,

where he grew up in a dense working class,

very Jewish neighborhood. His characters would sometimes make it as far as the fancier New Jersey

suburbs as in his first book, the novella Goodbye Columbus, which was published in 1959. He has

at least long stretches of novels set in New York City and in pretty college campuses outside the city.

Sometimes his characters make Al-ya, they go to Israel.

But he also wrote a fair amount about England.

You know, for a decade, starting in 1977, he spent about six months a year here, mainly in London, in Chelsea,

near the King's Road, where he lived with his girlfriend, who became his wife, then his ex-wife,

the British actress Claire Bloom. So, Adam, you and I both recently reread Roth's novel,

The Counter Life, published in 1986. And toward the end of that

...