Word: portnoy
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ALEXANDER PORTNOY complained that he was living in the middle of a Jewish joke--the Jewish joke of his whole life, as told to his shrink Dr. Spielvogel. That joke ended with Spielvogel supplying the punch line: "And now vee may perhaps to begin...
...Roth determination not to repeat himself is becoming, in fact, his most famous and only predictable trait. The writer who went from Portnoy's Complaint to political satire (Our Gang), and thence to Kafkaesque fantasy (The Breast) is now so impatient that he cannot even wait to complete this book before trying to reconstruct himself. In My Life as a Man, he switches persona in mid-volume. The result is superb as a performance and uneven as a book (or rather, two books). It leads, finally, to some questions. Does a kind of bravura restlessness now not only characterize...
...this "cornball Clytemnestra" for whom he feels no affection or even lust. Does Maureen represent the muse of disorder, the Dionysian element every artist suspects he needs? Or is she a case of purest masochism-the general contention of Dr. Spielvogel, Tarnopol's analyst, a literary referral from Portnoy...
...Jong--poet (Fruits and Vegetables, Half Lives), New Yorker (she lives on the same Manhattan block where she grew up), middle class, Jewish. Erica Jong has written a medley of a book, something of a cross between a True Confessions of a Feminist--How Tough it Is and a Portnoy's Complaint. The book is probably meant to be the new monument to the movement. It's got everything: woman as Oedipus, masochist, narcissist, feminist; woman as hostage of her fears, her fantasies, her false definitions; woman as siren seductress and sexually screwed up; woman as dependent and woman...
...phases. The cozy gemütlich atmosphere that originally made Molly Goldberg a household charmer is simply not in the air we breathe now. The current vogue in Jewish humor is pinpointed in the astringent, highly self-conscious comic imagination of a Philip Roth. Better they should have made Portnoy's Complaint into a musical, though nostalgia...