Word: roth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Portnoy's Complaint, Roth...
...Roth's use of the psychoanalytic confession makes for a most interesting form of characterization. Instead of delineating character, Portnoy recreates monsters. When Holden Caulfield told it all to a psychiatrist in Catcher in the Rye, it was really just a narrative device, just an excuse for the telling of a story. In the case of Portnoy, we never forget that he is lying on the couch. He is recreating the past from a specific, highly-emotional point in the present. Emotion recollected in tranquillity turns into hysteria. Each time Portnoy's mother Sophie reappears, another bit of horror...
...ONLY serious problem with the book is that much of the more controlled, more pointed social satire one associates with Roth has had to be forfeited. To be sure, there is still an overwhelming section on the WASP as seen by a young Jew. ("These are the children from the coloring books come to life, the children they mean on the signs we pass in Union, New Jersey, that say CHILDREN AT PLAY and DRIVE CAREFULLY, WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN.") It is more damning than anything in Roth's last novel, a story of an unwed mother in the great...
...will object that of what is included too much is pornographic. Advance notice on the book made it sound like a singular piece of middlebrow porno that would bring about a best-selling marriage between the wandering tribe of former Salinger aficionadoes and Jacqueline Susann's camp followers. But Roth reads so quickly and so engagingly that much of what could pass for smut is more parody than prurience. The book lacks the turgid seriousness that marked Updike's Couples as a more perfect example of the genre. Portnoy--who admits to being "the Raskolnikov of jerking off"--refuses...
...consolation, Roth doesn't ask the reader to identify with Portnoy (although, his experience isn't so ethnic that it lacks any larger application). Rather, Roth sets the reader beside Dr. Spielvogel. "Moral: nothing is never ironic," Portnoy tells us. We are then asked to put his joke into context. We must decide whether to laugh--the immediate response--or whether to be appalled by the self-deprecating clown who performs before us. Spielvogel solves the problem by answering with a single, ambiguous one-liner. Roth--after the 275 page monologue of Portnoy's Complaint-- calls it Spielvogel's "PUNCH...