Word: roth
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Younger readers might have a hard chore imagining the impact the best-selling Portnoy's had on popular culture in 1969. TV comics and gossip columnists talked incessantly about Roth and his scandalous book, often speculating about the author's personal life. Surely, so the wisdom ran, Portnoy's was really autobiographical; how could Roth have created such a vividly persuasive portrait of a man in hilarious turmoil except by actually being that...
Such a narrow conception of fiction and its imaginative resources annoyed and exasperated Roth. He could have deflected these misreadings by following Portnoy's with a novel whose central character bore no surface resemblances to himself. With characteristic contrariness, Roth did the exact opposite. Peter Tarnapol, the narrator of My Life as a Man (1974), is, unlike Portnoy but like Roth, a writer and one who has enjoyed early acclaim, hailed as "'the golden boy of American literature' (New York Times Book Review, September, 1959)." Tarnapol's obsessive topic is his disastrous first marriage; that Roth had lived through such...
When some of them took the bait, Roth went even further. Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator of The Ghost Writer (1979), seems identical to Roth in everything from his vocation (writer) and faith (Jewish) to his Newark childhood. (Tarnapol at least grew up in the Bronx.) What is more, Zuckerman is facing the same dilemma that Roth did, with considerable attendant publicity early in his career; he has been accused of writing a story involving misbehaving Jews that, other Jews claim, will confirm anti-Semitic prejudices in Gentile readers...
...these parallels between the invented and the real, The Ghost Writer conveys a formal design and aesthetic shapeliness that are antithetical to the factual imperatives of autobiographical writing. Roth has tirelessly insisted on the distinction between the raw material of life and the transforming power of fiction, and his energy shows no signs of flagging. His office is a study on his Connecticut property about 60 yds. from his house: "I work at my job the way most human beings work at jobs; I start mornings and quit evenings." Bad reviews no longer bother him: "I'm sometimes frustrated...
Looking back, Roth sees a pattern to his work: "Ever since Goodbye, Columbus, I've been drawn to depicting the impact of place on American lives. Portnoy's Complaint is very much the raw response to a way of life that was specific to his American place during his childhood in the '30s and '40s. The link between the individual and his historic moment may be more focused in the recent trilogy, but the interest was there from the start." Roth is a serious writer who has never been somber in print; his narrative voice is unique...