Word: ganges
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gang: (Starring Tricky and His Friends) is a pleasantly ad hominem attack on the President and his Administration that finds itself just about midway between college humor parody and morally outraged satire. In terms of Roth's previous work, it most closely resembles "On the Air" (New American Review No. 10), a fevered collage of oldtime-radio-programs-as-later-day-confidence-men as they invade the life of a threatened Jewish father. It's Roth's particular talent (or, to be more exact, one of Roth's particular talents) to be able to extract what's most nightmarish...
However, the particular comic premises that Roth employs to launch aloft Our Gang are almost embarrassingly weak. Beginning with Nixon's April 3 condemnation of abortion ("I cannot square (abortion) with my personal belief in the sanctity of human life--including the life of the yet unborn. For, surely, the unborn have rights also, recognized in law, recognized even in principles expounded by the United Nations."). Our Gang goes on to fantasize an in-the-streets revolt by the nation's Boy Scouts in the mistaken belief that their President has come out in favor of sexual intercourse, an Administration...
...matter, though, for to recount its plot is only to suggest the text that provides the scaffolding from which Our Gang goes on to mount an angry attack on the corruption that language must suffer in American politics. The book's events are told through press conferences. White House strategy sessions, Presidential addresses and network news analyses. In his best two pieces here, "Tricky Has Another Crisis: or, The Skull Session" and "The Assasination of Tricky." Roth has constructed frenzied fugues of political inanities...
There will be those, I suspect, who'll deery Roth--as they've already decried De Antonio--for the simplicity of his attack. To do so is to miss his point. Millhouse and Our Gang are simple, direct attacks because the object of their fury himself chooses to take so simple-minded a tack in his relationship with the American people. In burlesqueing such simplicity. Roth and De Antonio can only hope to force some concern over the degenerate state into which political language has fallen. Our Gang is hardly a partisan effort. Although there is a curiously inconsistent logic...
...Gang is hardly a major addition to Roth's literary output--although I'm sure the House of Random will do its damnedest to make us think otherwise--but it is a most valuable one. For there should be room on the shelves for minor works from major authors. Despite what Mailer would have us believe, to be engage need not be a full time occupation. It's also nice that, in this case, Roth should be the particular example at hand. Those who care to pretend that the seventies are nothing more but the dreadful fifties warmed over need...