Word: comical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Jewish rye. Not that it has ever been necessary for one to be Jewish in order to like Roth. When compared to the brooding and melancholic that seems so irrepressible in much of Bellow and Malamud, Roth's treatment of the American Jew has always been relentlessly comic--even if sometimes bitterly so. Bellow's Jews--optimistic characters like Augie March included--seem to have been wandering ever since the Diaspora began. Meanwhile, Malamud has drifted back into Czarist Russia to find realities analogous to present predicaments. Nothing but consciousness, so much consciousness that the Jew has been through...
...Paul Herz, but where Roth's study of Herz was pedestrian, weighted with many of the conventions of novelistic realism, that of Alexander Portnoy is wonderfully off-center. Roth's humor--which pervaded his early short stories only to be swamped and reduced to little islands of comic vignettes in the two novels that followed--is back on center stage where it belongs. Roth uses it to light up his portrait of the archtypal American male Jew. It's as if Roth is sending up a nine-foot menorah in the middle of Fourth of July fireworks, a dazzling display...
Draped in the Flag. While Terrence McNally's Next does not have quite the dazzle of Adaptation, it, too, is richly comic and McNally's best play to date. At an antiseptically bleak Army induction center, a potential draftee (James Coco) appears for his physical examination. He is fortyish, fat, balding, and obviously the victim of some computer error. Nonetheless, his examiner (Elaine Shore), a squat female sergeant of stony mien and rigid devotion to the Army manual, proceeds with the examination. In a sequence of mounting hilarity, the thoroughly discomfited Coco is forced to strip down...
...Down Comic. Although sex, psychoanalysis and Jewishness form the content of the novel, they are not its subject. The book is about absurdity-the absurdity of a man who knows all about the ethnic, sociological and Freudian hang-ups, yet is still racked by guilt because his ethical impulses conflict with the surge of his animal desires. In Alexander Portnoy's own words, he is "torn by desires that are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience repugnant to my desires...
...basic danger of doing a book as an act or a routine is that it is only as good as its last bit. Despite Roth's extravagant comic talents and ingenuity, Portnoy's Complaint flags in stretches. The ending is a boisterious but somewhat flatfooted way of getting Portnoy off the stage. On balance, however, Portnoy's Complaint is skillfully paced, eliciting more laughs per page than any novel in recent memory-Catch-22 and The Sot Weed Factor notwithstanding...