Everyman, by Philip Roth, Jonathan Cape, 192 pp, £10, ISBN: 0224078690

Philip Roth once claimed, in his collection of reflective and self-evaluating essays Reading Myself and Others (1975), that his critics saw him as an “irresponsible, conscienceless, unserious” writer, bereft of morals and seeking merely to outrage and shock ‑ a Howard Stern of the literary scene. And, it has to be said, on the surface of things his detractors had a point. From the moment Alex Portnoy rests his weary head on Dr Spielvogel’s couch in Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) he unleashes his frustrated howl on the forces of Judaism, sexual propriety and ‑ well, his mother. Consistent and, to give him credit, imaginative scenes of masturbation follow, involving threesomes with Italian hookers