"In a departure from Roth's recent meditations on age, his new novel revisits the no less sexually frustrating experience of growing up. We are back in 1950s Newark, and 19-year-old Marcus Messner, the son of a kosher butcher, attempts to escape his father's stifling influence by enrolling at a college in Ohio farm country. Messner is a scholarly type, while his new classmates are an unfriendly bunch of churchgoing, beer-swilling louts. Stubbornly disregarding overtures of friendship from members of the school's only Jewish fraternity, Messner devotes his attentions to a troubled Gentile named Olivia Hutton. There's something of Portnoy in the masturbation-filled high jinks that follow, but Messner, fearful that he might wind up a rifleman in Korea, is a far darker creation. Roth, blending the bawdy exuberance of his early period and the disenchantment of his recent work, demonstrates with subtle mastery the incomprehensible way ones most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result."—The New Yorker