Rambling Raconteur’s Reviews > The Great American Novel > Status Update

The riffs on Melville and Conrad are clever, but the alliteration and explosive language may reveal the deepest influence Joyce ever had on Roth. This is also one of his funniest novels, prefiguring the way he would drill for a very strange beat in Sabbath’s Theater.

This page might be the most metafictional amid Gil Gamesh alongside the Hawthorne and Melville references. The limit of language in describing a baseball game over the radio in the context of a novel “about” baseball strikes a melancholy striving to complement Roth’s ironies, both the subtle and the outrageous.