Word: tarnopol
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Spielvogel here treats a writer named Peter Tarnopol whose career is strikingly similar to Roth's. Tarnopol wrote a very successful, prize-winning, reputation-making first novel but then got into a disastrous marriage; he has not written much since. Now, "pussy-whipped" as he is by bitch-wife Maureen, he has decided to write "My True Story," the autobiography included as the second part of Roth's novel. Two of Tarnopol's stories--"Useful Fictions"--make up the first part...
...Tarnopol himself says, "his self is to many a novelist what his own physiognomy is to a painter of portraits: the closest subject at hand demanding scrutiny, a problem for his art to solve--given the enormous obstacles to truthfulness, the artistic problem." The novelist, of course, has to do more than stare at his reflected countenance. He has to distance himself from it to see it better and convert his topic from private exorcism to public explanation, from case to disease. And that is exactly what Roth fails to do here: the account is not just that...
...from life to fiction depends on formal tricks, in an effort to refine and accentuate the pure material. It is symptomatic that Roth should have his hero, through the account of his unhappy marriage and a couple of affairs, keep quoting from Flaubert, the original great modern impersonalist. Because Tarnopol can no longer just live his personal life. He has not just read too many novels, like Madame Bovary; he has read too many novels like Madame Bovary. He is condemned to work out the hassles of his marriage in a long, unfinished and unfinishable novel. His wife Maureen--whose...
...novel where Tarnopol has tried to order the disorder of his marriage lies, in reams of rejected drafts and re-drafts, in several cardboard cartons. On them the writer has pasted a quotation from Flaubert, speaking of how art can become "an outlet for passion, a kind of chamberpot to catch an overflow. It smells bad; it smells of hate." So, however, does Roth's book, despite all the cool distance of formal self-consciousness: it is impossible to read a book which treats a writer's life with such sordid particularity and not find oneself automatically extending the sordidness...
...search of the woman worthy of his heroic self-sacrifice, Tarnopol throws aside such winners, such female Tarnopols, as Dina Dornbusch (Sarah Lawrence, "rich, pretty, smart, sexy, adoring") on the way to his perfect losing cause. Maureen Johnson is a twice-divorced ex-barmaid out of Elmira, N.Y., afflicted by artiness, more than a touch of paranoia and a very odd walk. Roth often seems as baffled as the reader as to why Tarnopol should marry this "cornball Clytemnestra" for whom he feels no affection or even lust. Does Maureen represent the muse of disorder, the Dionysian element every artist...