Word: tarnopols
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like Roth, Peter Tarnopol, the narrator of his main story, is a hater of patterns, above all the repetitions of success. "The golden boy of American literature" at 26, Tarnopol has "a boundless belief in my ability to win." Why not? He has "never before been defeated." Graduated summa cum laude from Brown after a triumphant Yonkers boyhood, he manages to convert Army service in Germany into a prizewinning novel, A Jewish Father...
...flaw in Tarnopol is that as a book boy, he has "fallen in love with those complicated fictions of moral anguish" he keeps reading about. The depths of tragedy-that, Tarnopol thinks, is what an artist and a man must plumb. He yearns romantically to be a golden loser as well as a golden winner. Furthermore, he has a notion that one must prove one's manhood, not on the battlefields of war (like old-style machismo novelists) but in the combat zones of love. Nor is he fantasizing sexual conquest. For, paradoxically, what woman represents to Tarnopol...