Word: roth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...play's main character Rubek (Alvin Epstein), an Ibsen figure, is an aging sculptor disillusioned with his work and the idle life that wealth and fame have brought him. Rubek and his young wife Maya (Stephanie Roth) have become estranged. Maya cannot provide him with artistic or spiritual inspiration, and Rubek cannot satiate her hedonistic needs...
PATRIMONY by Philip Roth (Simon & Schuster; $19.95). The trick of this account of how the author cared for his dying father is that there is no trick, only a masterly demonstration of narrative control and emotional clarity that can evoke laughter and tears -- sometimes simultaneously...
...disease progresses, and the son becomes parent to the father. "Maybe you want to go in first and do something about your socks. You've got two different colors on. And I don't know if that checked shirt goes with those plaid trousers." Roth and his brother agonize about whether or not to let the doctors remove the tumor, an operation that may prolong their father's life but could also remove whatever it is that made Herman Roth Herman Roth. "Will I be a zombie?" he asks...
...will become a Mets fan. Roth rules out surgery and gets the old man interested in baseball. By the end of the 1986 season, he is as enthusiastic as a teenager. When Philip goes to London, Herman burns up the transatlantic phone system keeping his son up to the minute on the play-offs. "Hey," he says, worried about the bill, "I'm giving you this pitch by pitch to London, it's going to cost you a fortune." Roth's grand-slam reply: "But pitch by pitch I was enjoying it enormously, maybe even more than...
There is a great distance between Portnoy's Complaint, with its stage-Jewish parents, and Patrimony, the perfect eulogy for a stiff-necked elder of the tribe. Yet in celebrating his father, and by implication the source of his own character, Roth has not strayed from the long path he has cut for himself: to dramatize the adventure of assimilation in all its anxiety, humor and fertile illusions. As a writer and a son, he has now dotted the i's and crossed...