Word: roth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Which suggests that for Philip Roth, a novel has something to do both with telling the jokes that we live and that are all around us and with telling them on the analyst's couch, while trying at once to discover and to hide some essential self. Now Roth has brought Dr. Spielvogel back, and for nothing so much as to minister to writing and writers themselves. If Portnoy's Complaint taught us about a whole new malady through a novel, then My Life as a Man tries to teach us about the malady of the novel itself...
...41st year, Philip Roth still seems the most promising young novelist in America. With seven books behind him since Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award 15 years ago, he continues to apply to each succeeding title the thrust of a brilliant newcomer, as if staking out his subject and defining his voice for the first time...
...Roth determination not to repeat himself is becoming, in fact, his most famous and only predictable trait. The writer who went from Portnoy's Complaint to political satire (Our Gang), and thence to Kafkaesque fantasy (The Breast) is now so impatient that he cannot even wait to complete this book before trying to reconstruct himself. In My Life as a Man, he switches persona in mid-volume. The result is superb as a performance and uneven as a book (or rather, two books). It leads, finally, to some questions. Does a kind of bravura restlessness now not only characterize...
...Like Roth, Peter Tarnopol, the narrator of his main story, is a hater of patterns, above all the repetitions of success. "The golden boy of American literature" at 26, Tarnopol has "a boundless belief in my ability to win." Why not? He has "never before been defeated." Graduated summa cum laude from Brown after a triumphant Yonkers boyhood, he manages to convert Army service in Germany into a prizewinning novel, A Jewish Father...
...such winners, such female Tarnopols, as Dina Dornbusch (Sarah Lawrence, "rich, pretty, smart, sexy, adoring") on the way to his perfect losing cause. Maureen Johnson is a twice-divorced ex-barmaid out of Elmira, N.Y., afflicted by artiness, more than a touch of paranoia and a very odd walk. Roth often seems as baffled as the reader as to why Tarnopol should marry this "cornball Clytemnestra" for whom he feels no affection or even lust. Does Maureen represent the muse of disorder, the Dionysian element every artist suspects he needs? Or is she a case of purest masochism-the general...