Word: portnoy
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bound, Roth could have set about repeating the formula that had brought him such instant recognition. But one of his more intriguing aspects has been his refusal to tailor his work to anyone else's expectations. Within a decade of the delicate Jamesian fiction in Goodbye, Columbus, Roth wrote Portnoy's Complaint, a barbaric yawp of masturbatory misadventures and comic rage...
Younger readers might have a hard chore imagining the impact the best-selling Portnoy's had on popular culture in 1969. TV comics and gossip columnists talked incessantly about Roth and his scandalous book, often speculating about the author's personal life. Surely, so the wisdom ran, Portnoy's was really autobiographical; how could Roth have created such a vividly persuasive portrait of a man in hilarious turmoil except by actually being that...
Such a narrow conception of fiction and its imaginative resources annoyed and exasperated Roth. He could have deflected these misreadings by following Portnoy's with a novel whose central character bore no surface resemblances to himself. With characteristic contrariness, Roth did the exact opposite. Peter Tarnapol, the narrator of My Life as a Man (1974), is, unlike Portnoy but like Roth, a writer and one who has enjoyed early acclaim, hailed as "'the golden boy of American literature' (New York Times Book Review, September, 1959)." Tarnapol's obsessive topic is his disastrous first marriage; that Roth had lived through such...
...toward the polished and well mannered and resonant, a la 19th century British fiction. Not this time. Like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth before her, Goodman has achieved a breakthrough book by discovering and recording a thoroughly uninhibited narrative voice. Bellow found Augie March, and Roth hit upon Alexander Portnoy. Goodman gives the world Sharon Spiegelman...
...Roth has not lost one ampere of his power to rile and surprise. When Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh (The Professor of Desire) and Zuckerman writhed between desire and conscience, the psychoanalytic model was turned into serious comic fiction...