Word: rothe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Anatomy Lesson concludes Philip Roth's comic trilogy...
Nearly 25 years after Goodbye, Columbus brought him early fame and 15 years since Portnoy 's Complaint made him notorious and rich, Philip Roth continues to be misunderstood, or understood too quickly. There are causes for confusion: the contrast between the high-minded explainer of literary culture and the unbuttoned comedian who writes America's most raucously funny novels; the zigzagging from realism to fantasy, political satire to slapstick; and the dual image of the Connecticut country gentleman and the writing drudge whose spiritual home is Kafka's Prague...
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...
...plan: Don't build any sports palaces, refurbish the Memorial Coliseum. Spread the Olympic Village lightly over U.S.C., U.C.L.A. and U.C., Santa Barbara. Dot the megalopolis with stirring events. "We didn't have the three top sources of income available to all prior Olympic Games," Ueberroth (pronounced you-ber-roth) says. "The No. 1 income source has been government. We are putting on a private Olympics without government subsidies. The second source in Canada or the Soviet Union or Mexico City or Tokyo was Olympic lotteries. That's gone to us because it's against the law in California...