Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work by Philip Roth displays the two qualities most evident in his …Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work by Philip Roth displays the two qualities most evident in his nonfiction: intelligence and eloquence. In this collection he interviews or reflects on writers he has been close to, and whose work he has read carefully, starting with two Jewish writers whose lives were changed surviving the Holocaust, Primo Levi and Aaron Appelfield.The Levi encounter is rich because of Levi's homebody lifestyle, post-Holocaust. This is interesting: He lived in his home town in Italy all his life and for money, and satisfaction, he was a manager in a paint factory. This piques Roth's interest. He doesn't know any writers who have stayed so far out of the cosmopolis. He also ventures to suggest that one of Levi's books, a novel, If Not Now, Wben? has a seemingly narrow and tendentious focus, rendering it less compelling that Levi's more autobiographical work. Levi disputes Roth's implicit judgement--that this novel is forced--but what interests me is the risk Roth takes here, and elsewhere, in delivering bad news to a fellow writer.He says later on, in his piece on Bernard Malamud, that writers seldom talk to one another about their work for fear of giving offense, but when forced to do so (as when Malamud reads him a few humdrum pages of manuscript opening a work-in-progress), Roth has to say something, so he comes up with two comments that infuriate Malamud: that perhaps these shouldn't be the pages opening the novel and that he's curious about what happens next. Malamud answers that what happens next is irrelevant. He's pissed. That puts their friendship on ice for several years.In talking with Appelfield, Roth does it again. He says that he encountered some "difficulty" in reading Badenheim 1939 because it is shorn …