Word: portnoy
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Novelist Yuz Aleshkovsky, 54, views all forbidden topics as the domain of farce. The comic artist had to support himself in the Soviet Union writing children's books. Now he has returned to adult fiction with gusto. His raunchiest work, Nikolai Nikolayevich, is a Russian Portnoy's Complaint. In Aleshkovsky's book, as in Philip Roth's novel, the hero spends most of his time masturbating. The Russian, however, finds an ingenious way to turn his obsession into a cushy government job when a Soviet laboratory purchases his prodigious production of spermatozoa for the greater glory...
...articulation. Politicians who become national figures must be glib enough to operate under what Russell Baker calls "television's refusal to allow thought before speech." Even those who scorn publicity usually pursue it when they have a book or film to promote. Goodbye, Columbus made Philip Roth known; Portnoy's Complaint made him a celebrity. When a new novel appears, Roth unbends a little, but, as he told PEOPLE magazine, he dislikes questions about home, the family, marriage: "I've spent years trying to get it right in fiction, and I don't propose...
EVER SINCE Philip Roth introduced the neurotic, oversexed William Portnoy to the literary world, a band of literateurs has harried him. Reviewers accustomed to propriety panned the book and accused Roth of writing pornography. Zionists and orthodox Jews charged him with betraying his heritage and making a mockery of the Holocaust. Jewish mothers, appalled by what they perceived as scathing anti-Semitism, threatened to lace his chicken soup with arsenic...
...years it took to finally shut Zuckerman's mouth, he says, "Ten out of every twelve months spent writing are spent being wrong." This is a hard fact of literary life. It might well be the origin of Dr. Spielvogel's concluding line in Portnoy: "Now vee may perhaps to begin...
...witless complain that humor is impossible to write in an age when headlines are more absurd than the products of imagination. Richler's contemporary entries offer hilarious refutation. Excerpts from Stanley Elkin's The Dick Gibson Show and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint belong on the shelf with Rabelais and Swift. Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode stands as a classic. In it, a professor of humanities is propelled backward in time to the arms of Madame Bovary and the pages of a remedial Spanish textbook: "He was running for his life over...