Word: rye
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...TRIP, by John Donovan (Harper & Row; $3.95). A few months in the life of a 13-year-old emigre from New England to New York City in the custody of a mother who is almost a stranger. Rather sophisticated, with a semihomosexual scene, and a semi-Catcher in the Rye style, the book is nevertheless remarkably touching...
...Edel sees it, in all ways, James revived. He moved from London to Sussex with his "faithful fat dog" Tosca, a canary and a bicycle. He had dinner at 8 on his terrace, as if his English cottage were a Florentine villa. Finally he bought Lamb House in Rye, acquired an agent, and managed his business with unsuspected shrewdness. He priced his short stories (in good times, he wrote one a week) at $250, got as much as $375 for an article, and insisted on $3,000 from Harper's Weekly for serial rights to The Awkward...
...since John Young smuggled a corned-beef sandwich aboard the Gemini 3 flight in 1965 and littered the spacecraft interior with crumbs, the astronauts were allowed a supply of bread. To withstand the pure-oxygen atmosphere, which quickly dries bread and makes it crumbly, the slices of white and rye bread had been flushed with nitrogen, a process that keeps them fresh for two weeks...
PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT should do for novelist Philip Roth what Levy's advertisements did for Jewish rye. Not that it has ever been necessary for one to be Jewish in order to like Roth. When compared to the brooding and melancholic that seems so irrepressible in much of Bellow and Malamud, Roth's treatment of the American Jew has always been relentlessly comic--even if sometimes bitterly so. Bellow's Jews--optimistic characters like Augie March included--seem to have been wandering ever since the Diaspora began. Meanwhile, Malamud has drifted back into Czarist Russia to find realities analogous...
Roth's use of the psychoanalytic confession makes for a most interesting form of characterization. Instead of delineating character, Portnoy recreates monsters. When Holden Caulfield told it all to a psychiatrist in Catcher in the Rye, it was really just a narrative device, just an excuse for the telling of a story. In the case of Portnoy, we never forget that he is lying on the couch. He is recreating the past from a specific, highly-emotional point in the present. Emotion recollected in tranquillity turns into hysteria. Each time Portnoy's mother Sophie reappears, another bit of horror...