Word: roth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...GHOST WRITER by Philip Roth Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 180pages...
According to the cabbies of American fiction, Philip Roth has a great glove but can't hit the long ball. The fans will always yearn for the big shot that resounds with bulging affirmations and conventional wisdom. Roth even parodied this expectation in The Great American Novel (1973), a 400-page indulgence of his gifts for lampoon and mimicry...
That display now seems to have been a form of primal yuk therapy at the onset of middle age. Roth was 40 at the time. His reputation as a master of literary comedy had been firmly established by Portnoy's Complaint. My Life as a Man (1974) and The Professor of Desire (1977) returned to the sensitive roots of his wit: the conflicts between lust and respectability, art and burlesque, cultural ties and personal freedom, the problem of how to be-or not to be-a Jew. Civilization and its discontents were no longer a set of Freudian trampolines...
...Ghost Writer promises the incredible with the suggestion that Anne Frank is alive and working at Harvard's library. But Roth steps back from the inviting brink of fantasy. He retreats, in fact, to the drab reality of the 1950s, the time of his own spectacular debut as the author of Goodbye, Columbus. The new book retains the look, if not the actual furniture, of autobiography. Goodbye, Columbus is called Higher Education; its author is Nathan Zuckerman who, like Roth, was raised in a middle-class Jewish section of Newark. His story is based on a family embarrassment...
...stimulate an entire roach species into extinction. As rueful scientists have found in using pesticides, a few hardy roaches can usually survive a chemical spray because of some lucky genetic abnormality and will then propagate a new generation of spray-resistant offspring. Declares Entomologist Louis Roth, a pioneer in roach research: "The best we can hope for is to reduce their numbers...