Credo

James Wood, in a review of Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, published in The New Yorker:

Fiction, for Roth, is not what Plato thought mimesis was: an imitation of an imitation. Fiction was a rival life, a ‘counterlife’, to use the title of one of Roth’s greatest novels, and this is why his work has managed so brilliantly the paradox of being at once playfully artful and seriously real.