'Disturbing, logical and very funny... In short, a masterpiece' New York Times Book Review
A ferocious political satire in the great tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, Our Gang is Philip Roth's brilliantly acerbic response to the phenomenon of Richard M. Nixon.
In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth portrays an American president who outdoes the severest cynic; a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn't have a problem with killing unarmed women and children. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on pro-pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public.
Tricky is the unprincipled self-seeker who hides his heartlessness behind the anaesthetising cliches of high office, whose public language is a merciless parody of that 'candid' Presidential prose which is merely double-talk, or as Orwell put it, 'pure wind'.
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.
In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus - a collection of stories, and a novella - for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy's Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America's finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.
Roth's lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.
Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.
Title: Our Gang: Starring Trick and His Friends
Author: Philip Roth
ISBN: 9780099389118
Binding:
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication Date: 1994-11-03
Number of Pages: 208
Weight: 0.1407 kg
The uncontested master of comic irony * Time *
Very funny - I laughed out loud sixteen times and giggle internally a statistically unverifiable amount. In short, a masterpiece... I cant think of anything like it * New York Times *
A bitter yet hilarious lampoon...a remarkable display of satiric vehemence. An extremely (in every sense) funny, nail-bitingly anxious work * Financial Times *
When Philip Roth sends Richard Nixon to hell in Our Gang, there is delight in recognising that if there is a hell, Nixon will probably act there just as Roth describes him * Washington Post *
Perhaps the funniest and most complex exercise in sustained political satire since Animal Farm * Newsweek *
