Word: tarnopols
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...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...
...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...