Word: portnoy
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...into an acrimonious separation in 1963 that left Roth deep in debt, thanks to legal expenses, and sent him reeling into five years of psychoanalysis. Awful, but for the sake of the narrative not bad. Right about here a reversal of fortune would do nicely. So our hero wrote Portnoy's Complaint (1969), the novel that made him rich, famous and controversial. Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy were snapped up by Hollywood. And then . . . and then Roth fell in love with a movie star...
That last touch may strike some as overdoing it. But going too far has been a hallmark of Roth's fiction from the beginning. His early stories provoked some Jewish readers to condemn him for anti-Semitism; Portnoy gave him a reputation as a sex maniac. His three books about Nathan Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), have led to charges that Roth is trapped in narcissistic reverie, writing about a writer who resembles himself. As if thumbing his nose at such comments, the author now offers The Counterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...seem the epitome of boredom. His favorite place to write is a gray colonial 1790 farmhouse set on roughly 40 acres of land in Connecticut's Litchfield County. He bought the place in 1972, in part to get away from the demands and notoriety that had hounded him after Portnoy. He got plenty of solitude for his money, sometimes, he acknowledges, a bit too much: "Night up here can come down like a heavy thing." Before that happens, Roth has usually put in a reclusive day. By 9:30 each morning he has walked some 50 yards from his house...
...gets bogged down by sheer malice. The fictional Joshua's mother is absurd--a vain, floozy stripper--and his coarse father (adequately played by Alan Arkin, in the film's only good performance) lives a cliche. Richler's story of Jewish lust/angst was better served by Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint...
...British novelists, Amis projects a large and raucous vision. He seems to have learned his heightened personal voice from Saul Bellow, the humorous uses of inverted logic from Joseph Heller and his naughty bits from Philip Roth. In fact, Self can be just as shocking and funny as Alexander Portnoy, an accomplishment not likely to go unnoticed. Amis' new novel should have feminists calling for blood and entertainment packagers trying to raise the ghost of John Belushi...