Word: roth
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...also received, and he was brought into the dialogue. These talks laid the basis for what may eventually be a Dole-Rostenkowski tax bill, which, noted one aide, would have the advantage of allowing everyone to take credit for "a statesman-like compromise" while removing the partisan Kemp-Roth label...
ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND by Philip Roth Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 225 pages...
...Philip Roth once described himself as part Henny Youngman and part Henry James. His severest critics, however, treated him as if he were part Lenny Bruce, part Meyer Lansky. The studious, law-abiding author of Portnoy's Complaint was regarded by some to have distorted his heritage for a few laughs and committed a profitable act of cultural gangsterism. Judging from his published responses, Roth was surprised that he had caused such a fuss. One does not, after all, have to be Alfred North Whitehead to understand that the characters in Portnoy are amusing words on paper...
...fact remains that writers, like industrialists, exploit resources. And writers usually get more personal. Roth's heightened realism works because it is faithful to specific locales, customs, attitudes and speech patterns. His urban Jews would be out of place in Addis Ababa. Ironically, fame made Roth himself vulnerable to distortion and caricature by the heightened realists who turn successes into celebrities. To be regarded as the thinking man's Woody Allen is the sort of acclaim he can live without...
...Roth's stab at seriousness is less brilliant. As he dies, Zuckerman's father looks at his son and whispers, "Bastard." Is this the final misunderstanding, the last, most painful blurring of illusion and illusionist? The question is mooted by Zuckerman's response. He is relieved. With his father dead and his old Newark neighborhood unrecognizable, the author of Carnovsky is literally unbound...