Word: roth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Scatology as a tool. Although the literary qualities of Portnoy's Complaint are uniquely Roth's, the monologue technique is pure show biz. The similarities between Portnoy's delivery and that of the late Satirist Lenny Bruce are readily apparent. While Bruce used scatology in his nightclub performances as a tool, primarily to uncover social hypocrisies, his savage humor also gained its neurotic style from conflicts about appearance and reality. For example, Bruce was constantly asking why portrayals of people doing something as beautiful and useful as making love were considered obscene while portrayals of murder...
...basic danger of doing a book as an act or a routine is that it is only as good as its last bit. Despite Roth's extravagant comic talents and ingenuity, Portnoy's Complaint flags in stretches. The ending is a boisterious but somewhat flatfooted way of getting Portnoy off the stage. On balance, however, Portnoy's Complaint is skillfully paced, eliciting more laughs per page than any novel in recent memory-Catch-22 and The Sot Weed Factor notwithstanding...
...part of Roth's immense gift that he can somehow make obsessive masturbation, paranoia and four-letter words funny and therefore ultimately inoffensive. No one has written so amusingly and yet so crassly about sex since Henry Miller. How does Roth do it? It is no secret that laughter is one of man's best defenses against those things that embarrass and terrorize him. Neither is it a secret that those who can make us laugh the loudest are often the most embarrassed and terrorized...
...Right now, Portnoy's Complaint is an event," says Philip Roth. "In two years it will be a book." The event was preceded by an enormous advance buildup; excerpts from the book were reprinted in various magazines, and the more outrageous passages were quoted and passed around. Now an assured hit that was sold out in bookshops weeks before its publication date, Portnoy's Complaint has already brought Roth a $250,000 advance on royalties, $350,000 in paperback sales...
...Roth's books have sold well, but he has never really been controversial or had his apartment examined in gossip columns ("the smart East 80s ... very solid, no patterns"). Now that Alexander Portnoy has made him a celebrity, he is dodging fame with SalI ingeresque determination-which, of course, only draws more attention to him. He used to answer the phone, "Benito Cereno here."* Now he doesn't answer his phone at all, and he tends...