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