Word: portnoy
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...first thing to say about Roth's Indignation is that it's a terrible book. The Roth who wrote Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 was a ranting, sulfurously brilliant stylist whose paragraphs were so full of energy and intelligence gone feral with self-loathing that they practically tore themselves apart on the page. This was a writer who showed us his adolescent hero sinning carnally with a hunk of raw liver that his unsuspecting family ate for dinner later that...
...even the lyrical late Roth of American Pastoral. Indignation is the work of the late-late Roth, the Roth of bitter, bitten-off miniatures like Everyman and Exit Ghost: curt, tetchy, unhumorous. But this post-Roth Roth does have something to say to the Roth who wrote Portnoy 40 years...
...Portnoy (one always wants to type Porn-toy) was born, like Roth, in 1933; Marcus Messner, the hero of Indignation, is a year older. Like Portnoy, Marcus comes from a smotheringly protective Jewish family in Newark, N.J. ("You are a boy with a magnificent future ahead of you," Marcus' father tells him. "How do I know you're not going to places where you can get yourself killed?") Like Portnoy, Marcus escapes to college in Ohio, where he is baffled and inflamed by the attentions of a sexually unfettered shiksa. Unlike Portnoy, Indignation is a weird, flawed little book, full...
...Indignation. Like Updike, Roth could be said to belong to the literary Me generation: writers (Norman Mailer was another) who traffic in thinly veiled alter egos, whose own internal dramas are their primary source of material. David Foster Wallace called them the Great White Narcissists, and it's true: Portnoy's awareness of the world around him more or less stopped at the end of his erect penis...
...faults, the Roth of Indignation is interested in subjects outside himself: war, politics, history, death, things that impinge on the warm bubble of self and family. Whereas Portnoy tells his story from a psychiatrist's couch, Marcus narrates Indignation from beyond the grave (or possibly from a morphine coma). He has been drafted into the Korean War--a draft for which Portnoy was a year too young--and he has fallen on the battlefield. You could read this as Roth's quasi-Oedipal execution of his younger alter ego, but it plays more like a correction: Wake up, Portnoy, there...