Word: tarnopol
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...Tarnopol's account definitely has the chamberpot stench. He tells how, in an uncontrollable fit of anger, he literally beat the shit out of his wife. When he learned how she had tricked him into marrying her by faking a pregnancy test--she bought a pregnant woman's urine on the street--he went into a frenzy and ended up inexplicably donning some of his wife's underwear. All of this--even if safely banished to a past behind Tarnopol telling how he told Spielvogel about it--still leaves an impression of twisted relationships and crude impulses in conflict that...
...PASSION seems even more paradoxical because it lies under the cool formal surface. The formal tricks strain toward a big-league style that Roth simply does not possess--Roth seems to have been reading Nabokov. He includes a whole series of "found" documents. There are Tarnopol's writings, and within them letters, an article written by Spielvogel, a paper by one of Tarnopol's students, and a couple of strange memos commenting on Tarnopol's writing produced by none other than Lane Coutell and his wife Frances: Salinger's Franny has married her college boyfriend and both, thanks to Roth...
...Roth can handle. The poke at Salinger juts oddly out of place, and the parodies of other writing aren't very funny. For all his frequent flashes of skill, Roth is swinging wildly. He is trying to be winning, trying to disarm our reaction to all the ugliness in Tarnopol's life, trying to get us to laugh it all off. He confronts head-on the inevitable tendency to link novel and author by trying to turn it into yet another novelistic joke, luring us into the connection and then proving how unjustified it is, how distanced the material...
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...