Slow Learner 2. Also.

[Mark Kohut]

In Ms. Claudia Roth Pierpont's ROTH UNBOUND, Philip is quoted as
saying now that his story DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH, one of the stories
in his first book, is "the first good thing I ever wrote"....... (most
of) the others
in this book were written/published before that one.......so, like TRP
he has a perspective on when his story-writing matured.

DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH appeared in the New Yorker only two months
before the book appeared. Would seem to have been placed because of
the impending book, 2 seven months on press per usual,  which included
his novella GOODBYE, COLUMBUS.

There is no overt declaration in this book, as TRP said about LOT 49,
that he no longer likes that
novella but elsewhere he has said as he reread his life's work that he
stopped before the earliest ones.

Alfred Kazin lead his review of that book with " one day, while
reading The New Yorker, I was awakened by Philip Roth's DEFENDERS OF
THE FAITH"....
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l