Over 55 years ago, when I was a skinny little kid attending Middle Park Primary School, my mates and I would sail icy-pole sticks in the holy water at the nearby Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. I couldn’t understand why the people in the pictures inside the church had gold plates behind their heads. I later learned, I can’t recall how, that what I thought were gold plates were really haloes. Since then the only haloes in my life have been halo traction for patients’ neck injuries, and the halo effect. I thought about the halo effect two weeks ago when I was reading Philip Roth’s latest novel Indignation. Born in 1933, Roth is one of America’s most prolific and most celebrated writers. In recent years he’s published a book a year, with Indignation his 2008 offering. I found it immensely disappointing – the plot pedestrian, the writing competent but not extraordinary, and like his recent books, little more than novella length (256 pages, but big print) allowing insufficient scope for character and thematic description and development. Yet it’s been universally positively reviewed [1,2,3]. I wonder if this is the halo effect at work. Or perhaps no reviewer would dare review negatively, the work of as decorated a writer as Roth. I’d like to think I’m wrong and the reviewers are right.
1 week ago
