Young Klein rejected Roth for his cartoonish female characters before discovering his doubles writing.

Evidence

As with my earlier brand-defense conundrum, this was awkward for me for highly personal reasons. The main one being that my last encounter with Roth on the page was when I, at age twenty, whipped a copy of The Counterlife across my University of Toronto dorm room, vowing to never read another book by Philip Roth ever again. I was done learning, in intricate detail, about the complex life of his male characters, their intimate psychological dramas, and their big global ideas, only to have the female characters bounce across the page like scantily clad nurses in a Benny Hill sketch. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 450

Categorization

• XREF: Klein’s self-aware humor about her own youthful canon seems staged to set up the Roth payoff — relevant for the reader tracking how the device is being assembled.