Word: roth
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There is also the matter of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's fictional alter id and hero of a comic trilogy that has forever flattened the myth of the glamorous writing life. Zuckerman, of course, is not Roth but rather the fullest and most personal expression of a theme that has come to dominate his work: the mayhem unleashed by those who would escape their pasts. This may be what David Kepesh in Roth's The Professor of Desire had in mind when he spoke stiltedly of "the destructive power-of those who see a way out of the shell...
...Roth has a genius for the comedy of entrapment. He is an uncompromising myth buster with a taste for bruising intimacy. Neil Klugman of Goodbye, Columbus and Alexander Portnoy were devoid of sentimentality and nostalgia for a lost paradise. Their Newark neighborhood had its charms, but it was basically a staging area for an assault on the sophisticated culture of New York, perhaps even London and Paris. The golden ghettos of suburbia struck them as Newarks with wall-to-wall carpeting...
Ambitious boy kicks burg is a familiar story, and central to the Zuckerman books. The Ghost Hunter (1979) introduced a young Nathan, like Roth a Newark-born writer who was hailed as the most promising voice in American letters. Zuckerman Unbound (1981) found the hero in his 30s, beleaguered by celebrity and controversy. Carnovsky, a Portnoy-like novel, had angered the community and his own family. His father's dying word to his son was "Bastard." Roth's father, a retired insurance executive, is a vigorous supporter of his son's work...
...trilogy is Roth's most complex and structurally satisfying work. It is a disciplined string ensemble compared with Portnoy's Complaint, which had the primal power of a high school band. Yet Zuckerman and Portnoy have close ties. Both star in comedies of the unconscious, burlesques of psychoanalytic processes whose irreverence and shocking explicitness challenge the pieties that protect hidden feelings. "Ill tell you your calling," screams Zuckerman at Critic Appel, "President of the Rabbinical Society for the Suppression of Laughter in the Interest of Loftier Values! Minister of the Official Style for Jewish Books Other than...
...Roth has expressed similar sentiments, more suitably phrased for literary debate, in Reading Myself and Others (1975). In this collection of essays and interviews he answered his critics, among them Irving Howe. In the pages of Commentary, the monthly magazine of the American Jewish Committee, Howe rendered the solemn judgment that Portnoy's Complaint degraded American Jews. Roth saw the roots of such attacks in history. Wrote the embattled author: "He [the Jew] is not expected to make a spectacle of himself, either by shooting off his mouth or shooting off his semen, and certainly not by shooting...