Word: shylock
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BOOKS Philip Roth's Operation Shylock is a double delight...
TITLE: OPERATION SHYLOCK: A CONFESSION...
...naturally, the central character and narrator of his new novel, Operation Shylock, appears under the name Philip Roth. And he is not the only one to do so. Another man in the book calls himself Philip Roth. This second Roth is in Jerusalem, where the first Roth plans to visit early in the novel. He is giving interviews and drumming up support for the movement he calls Diasporism: a plan, in the hope of averting a second, Arab-engineered Holocaust, to move all the Jews of European descent out of Israel and back to the countries of their ancestors...
...turns out to be. Operation Shylock is not at all the desiccated exercise its premise -- doppelgangers, Identity vs. the True Self -- might suggest. The author admits that the subject of real or imaginary doubles has been pretty thoroughly and bookishly exhausted by everything from Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray to Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: "I knew all about these fictions about the fictions of the self-divided, having decoded them as cleverly as the next clever boy some four decades earlier in college. But this was no book I was studying...
Javerbaum redeems himself during those scenes in which Shylock is left humiliated by Portia and Antonio, forced to yield all of his possessions, and made to renounce his religion. In these moments Javerbaum raises his performance to the level of Shakespeare's writing, evoking intense pity as he leaves the stage a broken...