Word: portnoy
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...PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT should do for novelist Philip Roth what Levy's advertisements did for Jewish rye. Not that it has ever been necessary for one to be Jewish in order to like Roth. When compared to the brooding and melancholic that seems so irrepressible in much of Bellow and Malamud, Roth's treatment of the American Jew has always been relentlessly comic--even if sometimes bitterly so. Bellow's Jews--optimistic characters like Augie March included--seem to have been wandering ever since the Diaspora began. Meanwhile, Malamud has drifted back into Czarist Russia to find realities analogous...
...depths where he was once content to capture the ironies on the surface. To some extent, the process began in the character of Letting Go's Paul Herz, but where Roth's study of Herz was pedestrian, weighted with many of the conventions of novelistic realism, that of Alexander Portnoy is wonderfully off-center. Roth's humor--which pervaded his early short stories only to be swamped and reduced to little islands of comic vignettes in the two novels that followed--is back on center stage where it belongs. Roth uses it to light up his portrait of the archtypal...
Letting Go. In many ways, Roth's past life resembles Alex Portnoy's. He was born 35 years ago in a heavily Jewish section of Newark. His father worked for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Philip zipped through Newark public schools skipping a grade, went on to graduate from Bucknell University magna cum laude. In 1955 he took an M.A. and became an instructor at the University of Chicago, where Theodore Solotaroff, editor of the New American Review, remembers him as "a handsome young man who stood out in the lean and bedraggled midst of us veteran graduate...
...older divorcee collapsed after four years. Philip went to New York after the publication of Letting Go, a troubled novel that interweaves threads from his Chicago adventure, his marriage and his grim life as a graduate student. The central question of the novel presages the issue that confronts Portnoy, only in reverse: Can one really let go of the self, renounce personal gratification for the sake of others? In Manhattan, Roth plunged into psychoanalysis, wrote a play that never got past the workshop stage, often retired to the writers' colony at Yaddo, a verdant estate in Saratoga Springs...
Where he goes from here is an intriguing question, and could prove a serious dilemma for him. There is quite a difference between letting go and catching on, and with Portnoy's Complaint, Roth has caught on, but good. He has said that he will write about catching...