Word: newarker
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HAVING documented life in Newark and New York, in the process establishing himself as a superb social satirist (though, admittedly, the satire of late has been diluted by too much detail and conversation), Roth has now written his first exclusively introspective novel. Having reached the age of 25, he begins to muck about in the depths where he was once content to capture the ironies on the surface. To some extent, the process began in the character of Letting Go's Paul Herz, but where Roth's study of Herz was pedestrian, weighted with many of the conventions of novelistic...
Strung out on Dr. Spielvogel's couch, Portnoy becomes the first of the lie-down comics. Raised in Newark and now holding the post of Assistant Human Opportunities Commissioner in New York City, he renders his past absurd in an attempt to lessen its painful grip on him. He keens the familiar tale of the strongwilled, overattentive mother and the castrated father. He tells how his mother fondled him during toilet training, how she eroticized the insides of his ears while removing the wax, and how she forced him to eat at knife point. Portnoy is continuingly being floored...
Letting Go. In many ways, Roth's past life resembles Alex Portnoy's. He was born 35 years ago in a heavily Jewish section of Newark. His father worked for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Philip zipped through Newark public schools skipping a grade, went on to graduate from Bucknell University magna cum laude. In 1955 he took an M.A. and became an instructor at the University of Chicago, where Theodore Solotaroff, editor of the New American Review, remembers him as "a handsome young man who stood out in the lean and bedraggled midst of us veteran graduate...
...published When She Was Good, a bleak dissection of a smalltown Midwestern termagant without a single Jewish character. It was a long way from Newark and the Jewish milieu, but Roth's ventriloqual genius enabled him to handle the unfamiliar setting with considerable success...
League's Harlem Prep, or Newark Prep, as the next step on their path to college...