Philip Roth died on 22 May last, and I remembered this scene: on a cold February day in 1968, young stuttering Merry plants a bomb in the town post office. The explosion kills a bystander.

Then Merry disappears. Five years later, her father Seymour Levov, who owns a glove factory in Newark, finds her in hiding in a slum area of town. His daughter admits-now no longer stuttering-that she has exploded a few bombs and killed three other people.

In