The Facts is a work of compelling candour and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art.

Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from this life- his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college in the fifties; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the 'girl of my dreams' Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by Goodbye, Columbus; and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write Portnoy's Complaint.

The book concludes surprisingly - in true Rothian fashion - with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.