Word: rothe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reagan has been much less willing to back off from his "10-10-10" tax cut plan. First proposed by Congressman Jack Kemp of New York and Senator William Roth of Delaware, that scheme would reduce taxes by 30% over three years. Says one top White House aide: "I can't stress enough that the President is adamant in his belief that he was elected on the basis of a certain program. If he has to, he will make a fight out of it. He will go to the country." Still, most White House aides, including Chief of Staff...
...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...
Like the end of Portnoy's Complaint, the conclusion of Zuckerman Unbound suggests a new beginning. Nathan even shows his impatience when he says, "Being a poor misunderstood millionaire is not really a topic that intelligent people can discuss for very long." As a sturdy vehicle for Roth's comic genius, Zuckerman may show up again: Will he travel to Prague and discover Franz Kafka as an aged steam-bath attendant? Will he beget children who grow up to be literary critics? Will he win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and have to return it when everything...