Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...stage is set for a direct confrontation between life and fiction, drawn around the question of what fiction can say and do about life. The novel as joke has here turned to novel as formal trick, parentheses within parentheses, document inside document. And throughout runs a sense that Roth has put himself on the couch, decided to give up fictions and smokescreens, but then gone back on himself: he can't help lying, he can't help making fiction even--or maybe especially--of his own life...
...disease. And that is exactly what Roth fails to do here: the account is not just that of his own life, even if both he and Peter Tarnopol had wives killed in auto accidents and underwent analysis, but an account caught impotently in the middle, too flat for fiction and too exaggerated for life...
...Roth tries to get from life to fiction depends on formal tricks, in an effort to refine and accentuate the pure material. It is symptomatic that Roth should have his hero, through the account of his unhappy marriage and a couple of affairs, keep quoting from Flaubert, the original great modern impersonalist. Because Tarnopol can no longer just live his personal life. He has not just read too many novels, like Madame Bovary; he has read too many novels like Madame Bovary. He is condemned to work out the hassles of his marriage in a long, unfinished and unfinishable novel...
...link novel and author by trying to turn it into yet another novelistic joke, luring us into the connection and then proving how unjustified it is, how distanced the material has become. He is trying to turn the joke on us, and in the process turn life into fiction...
What Roth fails above all to do is convince us that the story is an important one, somehow privileged above everyday life. He wants us to agree with Tarnopol's assertion that in the end his "True Story" has become just another "useful fiction." What he proves in fact is only the complexity of the relation between fiction and life, how they can mutually invade each other's territory and both lose a locked combat. To show that is for Roth to put himself as a novelist on the couch of literary analysis, hoping to show that the novel...