Word: portnoy
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Philip Roth, however, is one of the literary masters most attentive to the body. He has written lovingly about its lusts (Portnoy's Complaint), its decrepitude (The Dying Animal) and the intersection of the two (a ribald graveside scene in Sabbath's Theater). In his slim, stark novel Everyman (Houghton Mifflin; 182 pages), about the life and (mostly) death of an unnamed adman, Roth plays the body's trump card: someday it will die and take the mind with...
Global Values 101 Edited by Brian Palmer, Kate Holbrook, Ann S. Kim, and Anna Portnoy Beacon Press...
...trying to persuade Jews to go back to Europe and re-establish Yiddish culture. This new Diaspora aims to avert an Arab-engineered Holocaust by returning Israelis to the countries of their ancestors. Seriously funny about Middle East madness, Roth riffs with an abandon not seen since Portnoy's Complaint...
...vacuum," as he later put it. Franzen began to wonder if literary fiction were going the way of the lyric poem, a deluxe specimen of cultural product enjoyed only by the happy few. When, he asked himself, was the last time an ambitious novel achieved the name recognition of Portnoy's Complaint, to say nothing of Catch...
Looking back, Roth sees a pattern to his work: "Ever since Goodbye, Columbus, I've been drawn to depicting the impact of place on American lives. Portnoy's Complaint is very much the raw response to a way of life that was specific to his American place during his childhood in the '30s and '40s. The link between the individual and his historic moment may be more focused in the recent trilogy, but the interest was there from the start." Roth is a serious writer who has never been somber in print; his narrative voice is unique...