Reflecting on Philip Roth in Harper’s not long ago, the journalist Hannah Gold observes that few of the novelists she read during her high school years “captured my imagination and became my companion throughout adulthood the way Roth did.” It is a moist confession familiar to writers who recall clinging to Little Women in faraway childhood with similar ardor. Yet now, in full maturity, Gold sees this transfiguring devotion as touching on “questions of inheritance as a problem of influence.” And in pursuit of such spoor — directly as reporter, aslant as skeptic, but chiefly as admittedly recovering Roth addict — she recounts her impressions of “Roth Unbound,” a conference-cum-dramatic-staging-cum-fan-tour dubbed “festival” that unfolded in March of last year at the New Jersey Performance Center in Newark, Roth’s native city. Stale though it may be, she calls it, in a rare flash of sinuous phrase, “the physical instantiation of a reigning sensibility.”