Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends)

First printing. Volume, measuring approximately 5.75" x 8.5", is bound in quarter black cloth and blue paper-covered boards, with stamped silver, red and gilt lettering to spine. Author's initials are stamped in gold on front cover, under two stamped red stars. Binding is firm. Top edge of text block is tinted red. Small ink stamp appears on front flyleaf. Interior is otherwise clean and bright. Dust jacket, with $5.95 price on front flap, shows light shelfweaer. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover. 200 pages. ""Our Gang" is Philip Roth's first book since "Portnoy's Complaint." Those readers who have followed Mr. Roth's career from its beginnings will not be surprised to find him moving into a new and startling direction. If, as some critics wrote, "Portnoy's Complaint" was the funniest book ever written on sex in America, then "Our Gang" may turn out to be the funniest book yet written on American politics. Once again Philip Roth has take a seemingly familiar subject, and with his fiercely comic imagination, carried it to a revealingly bizarre extreme. It is difficult to think of another American literary work of such sustained satiric thrust and irreverent inventiveness as "Our Gang." The hero -- or villain -- of "Our Gang" is Trick E. Dixon, self-pronounced legal whiz, peace-loving "Quaker," and somehow President of the United States. "Tricky," as imagined by Roth, is a hypocritical opportunist such as might be found in a comedy by Moliere; and his public language is a merciless parody of that "candid" Presidential prose which is an amalgam of anesthetizing cliches, Sunday School pieties, and plain old double-talk. Cast largely in the form of interviews, press conferences and public addresses, "Our Gang" demonstrates what George Orwell meant when he wrote: "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." Though steeped in an atmosphere of farce and fantasy, and at times deliberately evocative of Keystone Kop slapstick and baggy-pants burlesque, "Our Gang" is plainly a work conceived in moral indignation. It is Philip Roth's stinging and uproarious vision of a national leadership speaking the sort of debased language that, according to George Orwell, is "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.".…