In the stripped-down later novel (“Everyman,” “Exit Ghost,” “Indignation”), Roth seems to have dispensed with the detail and idiosyncratic richness of his earlier work. As he writes about old men failing at sex, and raging about failing at sex, we see the old writer failing at writing about sex, which is, of course, a spectacle much more heartbreaking.

At this point, one might be thinking: enter the young men, stage right. But our new batch of young or youngish male novelists are not dreaming up Portnoys or Rabbits. The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex. Prototypical is a scene in Dave Eggers’s road trip novel, “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” where the hero leaves a disco with a woman and she undresses and climbs on top of him, and they just lie there: “Her weight was the ideal weight and I was warm and wanted her to be warm”; or the relationship in Benjamin Kunkel’s “Indecision”: “We were sleeping together brother-sister style and mostly refraining from outright sex”...

Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing. Compare Kunkel’s tentative and guilt-ridden masturbation scene in “Indecision” with Roth’s famous onanistic exuberance with apple cores, liver and candy wrappers in “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Kunkel: “Feeling extremely uncouth, I put my penis away. I might have thrown it away if I could.” Roth also writes about guilt, of course, but a guilt overridden and swept away, joyously subsumed in the sheer energy of taboo smashing: “How insane whipping out my joint like that! Imagine what would have been had I been caught red-handed! Imagine if I had gone ahead.” In other words, one rarely gets the sense in Roth that he would throw away his penis if he could.

I'd like to just keep quoting it—it builds to an argument about different kinds of narcissism—but just go read it.

Question: Why is this the sort of thing you never do, Sam? Don't you realize the Book Review has been boring everyone for a very long time now? That this is the kind of the thing literary culture needs more of, an interesting essay on in interesting topic—energetic, clever, inherently compelling, reflective, well-argued? That looks at an idea as it's evolved in the culture by looking at the way it surfaces (or gets buried) in great books? That stirs up arguments among readers? That sends you back into your bookshelf? That sends you out of the house and into a bookstore?

Reviews of new books are important, and can be well-written and funny (recent example), but the only thing the Book Review ever puts on its cover is a review of a new book, and the only thing the Book Review ever puts inside (except for an obligatory back-page essay) is yet more reviews of new books, and almost only ever running reviews of new books (while good for advertisers) ends up being crushingly dull for the person at home, an avalanche of sameness. A Book Review that's a little less thumbs-up-or-thumbs-down consumer-centric, and more interested in ideas, is all anyone wants—and it would put more people in the mood to read (which wouldn't be a bad thing for those advertisers). A Book Review with a sense of humor, a sense of history, and knives in its pocket. (The graphics accompanying Roiphe's essay, by Paula Scher, are great, too.) The New York Times Book Review is the most influential book review out there, and has the resources to commission essays like this every week. Please?