Our Gang: Starring Trick and His Friends

''Disturbing, logical and very funny... In short, a masterpiece'' New York Times Book Review

A ferocious political satire in the great tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, Our Gang is Philip Roth''s brilliantly acerbic response to the phenomenon of Richard M. Nixon.

In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth portrays an American president who outdoes the severest cynic; a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn''t have a problem with killing unarmed women and children. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on pro-pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public.

Tricky is the unprincipled self-seeker who hides his heartlessness behind the anaesthetising clichés of high office, whose public language is a merciless parody of that ''candid'' Presidential prose which is merely double-talk, or as Orwell put it, ''pure wind''.