As you might have heard by now, Obama says his sensibility was partially shaped by the writings of Philip Roth. Jeffrey Goldberg, who heard it first, had set up a reader-contest: “In a couple of pithy sentences, tell us what the first 100 days of a Roth-influenced Obama presidency would look like. I’ll post the best responses. First prize is a piece of liver.” Some days ago, Goldberg put up the entry sent in by the anonymous winner:

“An Obama presidency,” said Murray to me then, shaking that maned head, that maned Newark head that had seen him through the riots, the fires, the lobotomizing of a city’s heart, a head that now embraced within its unusually wide span the trochaic hopes of a Kenyan-Kansan who might, but just might, if all went well and he nailed that Chappaqua succubus to the ground, he was thinking then, get that heart back again. “What a thing that would be, kiddo, what a thing to see a black kid come up that way, a black kid I tell you, a black kid in that Oval Office, a black kid, ‘cause you know as well as I do it’s only a black kid can make us proud again, take us back to making things again, put our people in the factories again, make us proud just to craft a pair of goddamn gloves again and don’t tell me he won’t do it, kiddo, you know as well as I do he will, because he can, yes he can, and he will, he will,” Murray swore. That was 2008, May I think it was, the last time I saw Murray alive, a year to the day before he came coffined back to Dover, shamed in life and death, with the blood of eleven Iraqi schoolchildren on his hands.

The only writer-critic who is good at this sort of thing is James Wood. Here is his parody of Zadie Smith.