Personal Western Cannon

Phillip Roth's commerical and critical sucess, The Plot Against America, leaves me in a bit of a conundrum when it comes to writing any kind of review. I wholeheartedly agree that PAA is a big, important and generally successful novel with a hook that's both timely and not without lasting impact-- that being said -- I can't honestly say I'm a big fan of Roth's style of writing. It seems that there exists a level of granularity in the description of not only the physical world, but the characters' states of mind and motivations that serves to, rather than make the Roth's world more real, instead remind us that Roth is somewhere behind the curtain writing about it. If PAA were 50 pages shorter, it would be a better book.