When She Was Good

n this mesmerizing, funny, chilling novel the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, the subject the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman. When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown injail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising workof fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.-