Mocking the age: the later novels of Philip Roth

Introduction : sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness

From The ghost writer to The counterlife : comic incongruity and the road to postmodernism

Operation Shylock : the double, the comic and the quest for identity

Sabbath's theater : Sabbath's fear of death

raunchy? picaresque? heroic?

American pastoral : the tragicomic fall of Newark and the house of Levov

I married a Communist : a grave misfortune replete with farce

The human stain : comic irony and the lives of Coleman Silk

The dying animal : pleasure is our subject

The plot against America : paranoia or possibility?

Conclusion : the farcical edge of suffering.