Word: roth
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That display now seems to have been a form of primal yuk therapy at the onset of middle age. Roth was 40 at the time. His reputation as a master of literary comedy had been firmly established by Portnoy's Complaint. My Life as a Man (1974) and The Professor of Desire (1977) returned to the sensitive roots of his wit: the conflicts between lust and respectability, art and burlesque, cultural ties and personal freedom, the problem of how to be-or not to be-a Jew. Civilization and its discontents were no longer a set of Freudian trampolines...
...Ghost Writer promises the incredible with the suggestion that Anne Frank is alive and working at Harvard's library. But Roth steps back from the inviting brink of fantasy. He retreats, in fact, to the drab reality of the 1950s, the time of his own spectacular debut as the author of Goodbye, Columbus. The new book retains the look, if not the actual furniture, of autobiography. Goodbye, Columbus is called Higher Education; its author is Nathan Zuckerman who, like Roth, was raised in a middle-class Jewish section of Newark. His story is based on a family embarrassment...
...real Amy curtly evades Nathan's questions about her background. She is a smart and very tough cookie. As is Lonoff; as is Zuckerman; as is Roth himself. The Ghost Writer is a bruising book. Within its artfully tangled plot, Roth tells off his critics and debunks romantic notions of the writing life. Henry James' "passion of doubt" and "madness of art" become a medieval incubus and fanatic patience; Lonoff, more the ascetic Old World Jew than his Yankee trappings might indicate, spends all his time pushing sentences around and worrying about them. His comment on writing...
...Roth gets it just right: the cadences and diction of the provincial and the pretentious, the fresh edge of Nathan's ambition, his helpless rage and the confusion of his victims. Zuckerman will do anything for a good line. He imagines going home with news for his mother. "I met a marvelous young woman while I was up in New England. I love her and she loves me. We are going to be married." "Married? But so fast? Nathan, is she Jewish?" "Yes, she is." "But who is she?" "Anne Frank...
...comes dangerously close to unimaginable Holocaust humor. It is funny and embarrassing at the same time, a God-forbidden break in decorum that allows the anarchic spirit out for a breath of air. Roth has always excelled at this, and if the reader is offended, The Ghost Writer strongly suggests that it is not the author's problem.-R.Z. Sheppard