Word: portnoy
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...melting-pot country whose image of the Jew is a hybrid composite of the sex-crazed fantasies of Alexander Portnoy and the excessive mentality of Fiddler on the Roof, Isaac Bashevis Singer is a refreshing breeze of sanity and reality. His stories and novels portary a life which vanished with the thud of German army boots-that of the shtetl, the Eastern European Jewish village. Not surprisingly, many of his simple tales and anecdotes of the old country ring with more authenticity than the slick, cynical products of our modern literati...
...Singer's best friend is Henry Miller, who sent him The Tropic of Cancer in Hebrew: yet Singer is critical of the humor in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. "The humor which is there is not real humor." he said. "It's not a humor which comes from character or from situation. It's the humor of embarrassment. This humor of revealing things which are to be covered has become important in this generation, but it's not going to last because how much can you uncover? Once the toilet and the masturbation are already in the literature...
After declining to take a bow at the Thai boxing matches in Bangkok, Novelist Philip Roth could not resist a dig at a bestselling rival. "Now if I were Norman Mailer," said the author of Portnoy's Complaint, "I'd be up in the ring after the first bout, kicking away at the boxers in golf shoes." Roth, who admits that his taxes have risen meteorically as a result of Portnoy, complained: "Every month I get a letter from the Government saying 'Congratulations! You have just sponsored another B-52 raid on Viet...
...Award as Woman of the Year when she was besieged by fans and autograph hunters. One young man had no paper, so he held forth the book he was carrying. The singer hesitated a moment, then signed, handing back what is probably the world's only copy of Portnoy's Complaint autographed by Dionne Warwick. . . . At one point during rehearsals for a satiric revue at Cambridge University, the young man got carried away and fell off his chair. Then, during a TV takeoff, Prince Charles fluffed a line and adlibbed: "What the hell comes next?" With that...
John Seelye puts that sort of stuff back in, with additions that will surely get Huck Finn an X rating at the local library. The "true" Huck not only commands all the four-letter words but has sex fantasies and responds to adolescent needs without Alexander Portnoy's after effects. Seelye himself answers Critic Leslie Fiedler's interpretation of Huck and Nigger Jim's relationship as homosexual by casually casting the bogus King as a dirty old man. Jim's only contribution to vice is to introduce Huck to the pleasures of hemp smoking...