Word: tarnopol
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...Philip Roth remarked, "If I ever wrote an autobiography, I'd call it The Counterbook." Fat chance, or so it seemed at the time. For nearly 30 years, Roth had been hearing accusations that he was merely a closet biographer, that his heroes, whether named David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol, Alexander Portnoy or Nathan Zuckerman, were simply transparent disguises for their self-obsessed creator. Finding that denials did nothing to stem such charges, Roth responded by heaping coals on controversy. Did some readers accuse him of anti-Semitism? Very well. Roth gave them and the world Portnoy's Complaint, a long...
...stormy love affair was capped by the calamity of their marriage. She later confessed, Roth claims, to having hoodwinked him by obtaining a urine sample from a pregnant black woman and submitting it to a doctor. Roth writes, "The description in My Life as a Man . . . of how Peter Tarnopol is tricked by Maureen Johnson into believing her pregnant parallels almost exactly how I was deceived by Josie in February 1959." He adds, "These scenes represent one of the few occasions when I haven't spontaneously set out to improve on actuality in the interest of being more interesting...
...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 the living room with my Gillette razor in her hand, waiting "patiently for me to finish talking with my undergraduate harlot and come on home so that she could get on with...
...much as Kepesh may resemble Portnoy and Peter Tarnopol-the protagonist-victim in Roth's My Life as a Man-The Professor of Desire is not simply a rehash of the earlier books. Kepesh's monologue is a more humane and thoughtful handling of the subject that has fascinated and obsessed Roth in print for the past ten years: the woebegone, self-destructive tug of war between high aspirations and low lusts. Kepesh is another of Roth's Jewish centaurs, trying to keep his head in a cloud of pipe smoke while ignoring his pawing hooves...
What Roth fails above all to do is convince us that the story is an important one, somehow privileged above everyday life. He wants us to agree with Tarnopol's assertion that in the end his "True Story" has become just another "useful fiction." What he proves in fact is only the complexity of the relation between fiction and life, how they can mutually invade each other's territory and both lose a locked combat. To show that is for Roth to put himself as a novelist on the couch of literary analysis, hoping to show that the novel...