Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...most explicit detail ever bound between the covers of a bestseller, Portnoy relives his adolescent masturbations. Boy Scouts, for example, will find the novel considerably more informative on the subject than their official handbook. He describes how he used his sister's unlaundered brassiere, his windbreaker on a bus, and even his baseball glove while sitting in the balcony of a burlesque house. But the more he discharged, the greater became his guilt. It was a vicious cycle that led him into his psychological ghetto of lust and shame...
...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...
...years later the prestigious job of writer-in-residence at Princeton. There he discovered to his dismay that his students could not write. In addition, his marriage to an older divorcee collapsed after four years. Philip went to New York after the publication of Letting Go, a troubled novel that interweaves threads from his Chicago adventure, his marriage and his grim life as a graduate student. The central question of the novel presages the issue that confronts Portnoy, only in reverse: Can one really let go of the self, renounce personal gratification for the sake of others? In Manhattan, Roth...
...unadorned by such easily translatable characteristics as splashy imagery or intellectual abstractions. Its strength lies rather in subtly suggestive tones and rhythms. No less a language snob and stylist than Vladimir Nabokov labored on and off for almost a decade to translate Pushkin's acknowledged masterpiece, the verse novel Eugene Onegin. Nabokov's rendering of this romantic (and mock romantic) panorama of Russian society was brilliant; yet even he decided to settle for strict literalism rather than attempt to re-create in English the Russian poet's verbal music...