Word: roth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...Roth's world is that of the nouveau riche and the pseudo-intellectual. His suburbanites struggle with the complexities of country clubs and housing developments; his professors, just out of Harvard or Columbia, are careful to pronounce Don Quixote with the hard X. None possess the depth or complexity of a Herzog. Roth sums it all up in my favorite image from his first novel, Letting Go (1962), when one sunny day the middle-aged Fay Silberman "goes outside their place in South Orange and her husband is being driven all over the lawn in their power mower...
HAVING documented life in Newark and New York, in the process establishing himself as a superb social satirist (though, admittedly, the satire of late has been diluted by too much detail and conversation), Roth has now written his first exclusively introspective novel. Having reached the age of 25, he begins to muck about in the 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...
...further information, we are told to consult an article entitled "The Puzzled Penis" which Portnoy's psychiatrist Dr. Spielvogel has published in an international psychiatry journal. The monologues that follow--some narrative recitatives, some pained arias, a few even approaching sociological chorales -- are elaborations on the themes which Roth first states so bluntly...
...like to think that Roth is also writing something like the Jewish parallel to Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He himself identifies Portnoy's older sister with a copy of Portrait. In his other work, Roth has introduced well-known book titles only for very specific reasons. Portnoy, like Stephen Daedalus, struggles to escape his family and his religion. And--as much as his country is Israel rather than America--he is forced to abandon that too when he finds himself inexplicably impotent during a visit there. But, unlike Stephen, he finds his solace...