Word: roth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...biggest literary splashes of the month are likely to follow the launching of two long-awaited novels by Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth. Both are to be published in mid-May. In other ways, too, they seem to be matched and curiously revealing pieces of American fiction (see following reviews). Both are profoundly American in style and subject: Roth's The Great American Novel, a satiric fantasy about a mythical baseball league; Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, a surrealist account of a car dealer in the Midwest. Vonnegut is the Erasmus of the black comedians, who feels life...
During a recent session of Great American noodling, Philip Roth, part-time professor of literature and millionaire novelist, composed a self-interview in which he saw himself both as Henry James and Henny Youngman. James, the 19th century novelist with a mind like a surgical-steel tweezers, revealed the delicate attachments between social conventions and motivation. Youngman, a basic Jewish stand-up comic, is a hammer-and-tongs man who reduces his subjects to recognizable pulp...
Only in America could you fill The Golden Bowl with seltzer and sell it. Few writers have had the talent and self-awareness to exploit such a cultural aberration as well as Roth. He fizzed onto the scene in 1959 with the award-winning Goodbye, Columbus, a novella whose tartness and clarity showed precisely what it was like to be a young Jew from Newark, N.J., ashamed of his lower-middle-class background and humiliated by the pretensions of the suburban newly rich. There followed two grim and carefully worked novels in which Roth misplaced his fresh, astringent tone. Letting...
Secondly, there is the peculiarly intellectual quality of the game, with its geometric layout and its deep well of tradition. Philip Roth, whose new book The Great American Novel concerns the fortunes of a homeless baseball team, recalls: "Not until I got to college and was introduced to literature did I find anything with a comparable emotional atmosphere and as strong an esthetic appeal baseball, with its longeurs and thrills, its spaciousness . . . its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its heroics, its nuances, its 'characters,' its language, and its mythic sense of itself, was the literature of my boyhood...
During Brandt's 2½-hour oration, which was interrupted 81 times by applause, convention delegates could almost hear the air hissing out of the Juso balloon. Even Roth, who was one of eight leftwingers elected to the party's 36-man executive board, admitted that he was "impressed" by Brandt's words...