Word: portnoy
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Nathan--Alexander Portnoy disguised by a U. of Chicago education--arrives at the New England home of his aging mentor, newly popular short story writer E.I. Lonoff, whom he has never met. Here he embarks on an intellectual journey to discover both the mystery behind Lonoff's ghost-like absence from the "real world" and the secret to Lonoff's uncanny ability to characterize the Jewish anti-hero in his stories. Along the way, Nathan encounters Hope, Lonoff's lonely, bitter and jealous wife, and the enchanting Amy Bellette, his precocious and loving student...
That display now seems to have been a form of primal yuk therapy at the onset of middle age. Roth was 40 at the time. His reputation as a master of literary comedy had been firmly established by Portnoy's Complaint. My Life as a Man (1974) and The Professor of Desire (1977) returned to the sensitive roots of his wit: the conflicts between lust and respectability, art and burlesque, cultural ties and personal freedom, the problem of how to be-or not to be-a Jew. Civilization and its discontents were no longer a set of Freudian trampolines...
...most successful and talked-about of the new books is Friday's My Mother/ My Self. Out of some 300 interviews as well as poignant glimpses of her own life, Friday has portrayed a pessimistic, almost Portnoy-in-reverse picture: it is so extraordinarily difficult for daughters to break their mothers' possessive bonds. Since its appearance in 1977, the book has sold 250,000 copies in hard-cover and an even more astonishing 2 million in paperback. A onetime editor and freelancer, Friday has become a favorite of the lecture circuit and TV talk shows...
...Good as Gold (Simon & Schuster; $12.95), in which Joseph Heller does for Washington, D.C., what he did for the military in Catch-22. This time Heller's hero is Bruce Gold, a Jewish writer from Manhattan's Upper West Side, who hopes to get away from his Portnoy-esque family to be a "high Government official," even though to do so he may have to get a "better" wife. "Belle would be O.K. for Labor or Agriculture," someone advises Gold, "but not for Secretary of State or Defense." And Gold's aspiration is to follow...
...hazard my own guess: Hallmark's LOVE was conceived on a Manhattan subway car by a fat, bald, 35-year-old greeting card writer with thick glasses, a perspiring brow, a poster of Cheryl Tiegs on his closet door and a conscience burdened by the same aboriginal sins Alexander Portnoy complained about. In other words, the Grinch may have stolen Christmas, but somebody is trying to pervert Valentine...