Word: rothe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...PHILIP ROTH READER Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 483 pages...
...should anyone buy books filled with fiction that has already appeared in other books? As any number of Philip Roth or Stanley Elkin characters might say, why not? Even those who happen to own all the 18 volumes that Roth and Elkin have written over the past 20 years are likely to find these two collections of golden oldies a sound investment, a way of consolidating large past pleasures into compact present ones. New readers have a different and equally worthwhile treat in store: the happy discovery of two serious comic writers...
...breed is rare. Aside from Roth, Elkin and Thomas Pynchon, it is hard to think of many other contemporaries who consistently qualify. Humorists go strictly for laughs, and more power to them. Roth and Elkin take a different direction; they pretend that they would gladly stick to brass tacks and the big issues if only the world were not so loony. The hero of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Roth's most celebrated novel, cries out to his psychiatrist: "Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I'm living it in the middle...
Some variation of this philosophy rests behind most of Roth's and Elkin's best work: The worst is yet to be, so watch out. The disasters that befall Roth heroes are chiefly sexual; well-educated, pampered men, they try to be moral and high-minded while writhing as passion's play things. Expecting life to resemble "high art," they are constantly outraged to find themselves crawling through "low actuality." A scene from the marriage of Maureen and Peter Tarnopol in My Life as a Man is screamingly typical: "Then, on hands and knees, she crawled into...
...miscues and misfortune that these books portray, they nonetheless inspire elation, the thrill of watching craftsmen work with words. Roth and Elkin are both superb monologists, comic sprinters, which is one reason why excerpts from their longer works still seem satisfyingly self-contained. Roth describes himself as a child with "one foot in col lege, the other in the Catskills," and the Borscht Belt routine is what his first-person narrators constantly imitate, no matter how much they want to sound like Chekhov or Henry James. Elkin's characters are prone to bursts of speechmaking, and their creator...