Word: portnoy
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...narrator of this breezy, anecdotal saga is no Portnoy, and it's easy to forget that any complaint was ever made, because the irony is irony with an option -- it is camp in the best sense, convincing enough to let the reader drop the bemused distance at will. The storyteller is a "fella name a' Smith; first name a' Word." Word Smith is a sagacious, grizzled and altogether senile old sportswriter with a penchant for alliteration and a lively obsession for the American idiomatic phrase. In the heyday of baseball -- the twenties, the thirties, the forties -- Smitty had written...
Then came Portnoy's Complaint, the public flowering of the Henny Youngman Roth, the brilliant cocktail-party mimic, hilarious storyteller and improviser of ingenious bits. His university degrees were set aside for the lessons learned on Newark's front stoops, where wisecracks and putdowns were the comic antitoxins against WASP sting and the guilt that could result from calling chicken soup consomm...
...landmark in American comic writing, Portnoy is not the final assimilation of the American Jewish novel. It is a complete cannibalization of it into the American Jewish anti-novel. Isaac Singer may continue to write marvelous stories about immigrant Jews; Saul Bellow may continue to chant the prayer for the dead over our decaying cities. But it is doubtful that anyone can ever write about the American Jewish family again without having his work ruefully compared with Portnoy's grotesque shadow...
Going public with Portnoy turned Roth into a hot property and brought him the awareness that "being famous was like being a box of Oxydol." Our Gang, The Breast and now The Great American Novel (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $8.95) definitely have extra-literary dimensions. They are also packaging and merchandising problems. Our Gang, which began with ten pages of devastatingly accurate satire of Nixonian newspeak, quickly slid into labored collegiate humor. Grossly padded-including too many blank end papers and repetitive title pages-the book became a $5.95 hardback steppingstone to a profitable publishing venture. Ditto The Breast, whose...
...Ruppert Mundys, the book is to contemporary fiction what silicone injections are to topless dancing. It is an extravagant mockery of form, a freak show aggressively thrust at the public. "Read me big boy till I faint," Roth seems to be saying, in a paraphrasing of Portnoy's burlesque-queen fantasy. He seems to have cleaned his desk drawers of every party bit and wild turn. He has also researched his subject, spending hours at the baseball Hall of Fame and leaning heavily for inspiration on Larry Ritter's The Glory of Their Times, a collection of interviews...