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In one of the short stories collected in his first published volume (1959), Philip Roth stages a student of a rabbinic school who quarrels with his master and ultimately insults him in rude terms. Afterwards, even if he takes pride in having mustered enough authority to assert himself, he is nonetheless awed by that wild “thing,” that “it” having surged up from hitherto unsuspected depths of his “self.” In his subsequent writer’s career Roth is frequently to work on variants of that basic twofold pattern. In The Human Stain, in some of his best known characters (Portnoy, or Sabbath), the emphasis is laid on the hideous “id.” In American Pastoral, he swings to the diametrical opposite with Seymour Levov, who has always done things “right” and dutifully conformed to what is implicitly expected from him. He is complacently thanking the Lord for His blessings, until the old “id” belatedly and abruptly looms up, in the guise of his monstrous daughter playing havoc in his pastoral landscape and ultimately wasting it.