Philip Roth (1933–2018)

This book was suggested to me during a discussion about an irksome segment of the 20thC literary canon: middle-aged male Americans obsessed with adultery, daddy issues or declining sexual appetite, usually relayed through obnoxiously academic or otherwise “intellectual” main characters, who think their navel-gazing is Such Serious Business. My example was John Updike; a friend suggested this novella by Philip Roth as a fun example of the subgenre.

And fun it was: The breast deals indeed show more with an aging American academic who is full of himself and who is obsessed with grandstanding through bragging about his intelligence and his sexual prowess. One day, though, he finds he has transformed into a female breast unattached to a body, an excessively grotesque development which leads to an unholy amount of introspection.

The fun part is that the novella is run through with a layer of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness: Roth walks the line between playing the subgenre straight and highlighting its pathological absurdity. Its over-the-top quality is what saves it: I don’t think it would have worked if any of it were any less outrageous. show less

It comes as no surprise that Roth handles death, dying, sex, and the effects of all three on the human psyche with more honesty, more ease, than any writer this country has produced. The Dying Animal is a perfect book that accomplishes so much more in its allotted pages than the average novel in twice, three times as many. David Kepesh has come a long way from the lit student-turned mammary - oh, how breasts reprise their role! In Deception-like fashion, Kepesh tells the story to some other show more figure in the room about an affair unlike any other. Consuela, a twentysomething Cuban immigrant, and one of Kepesh's students, is one of the fiercest and most interesting (female) characters that Roth has invented. She's the contender in the room that has Kepesh, whose list of sexual episodes reads something like an anonymous survey of male fantasies, damn near trembling with insecurity. Roth's mastery over the series of events that has these two meet, fuck, separate, and meet again, is nothing short of brilliance. And with Dying in the title, the reader can expect this novel, in which a Casanova Jewish intellectual is caught in the middle of a war between eros and thanatos, to come with painfully beautiful Rothian meditations on the inevitable end of life. Kepesh is finished. show less

I first read this one back in high school and, in a lot of ways, it's as good as I remember it being. The book can be, by turns, funny, insightful, excruciating and observant, but what's most impressive about it is how incredibly unforced it seems: Roth's facility for rendering dialogue -- or rather, monologue -- is nothing less than amazing. Reading this one, you might as well be in the room with Alexander Portnoy, listening to him rant, remember, complain and interrogate himself. The novel show more verges on being some sort of historical document: in fifty years, you might be able to hand this to someone and say, "this is how American Jews spoke in the twentieth century." The text, which, of course, leans heavily on the passive voice, overflows with jokes, swears, regionalisms, and yiddishisms. You might also be able to say "this book perfectly expresses the condtradictions faced by the Jewish diaspora in the United States and exposes the cultural contradictions inherent in sixties-era liberalism." Any one of these would be an accomplishment, but Roth seems to pull them off all at once while barely breaking a sweat. It's half comedy routine and half exorcism, and it's a joy to read.

But there are also a few things here that keep this from being a five-star review. The first is that Alexander Portnoy seemed a whole lot less likable the second time round that he did the first, though this might have been because when a teenager myself I focused on his accounts of his teenage troubles. These sections still go down easier: Portnoy's more endearing when he plays his parents' victim than when he's acting like a fault-finding, thoughtless, chauvinist, a role that he occupies for much of the book's second half. The fact that he knows that's he's being unbearable, most of the time, doesn't make this stuff easier to read. Also, the book suffers from what might be termed the Woody Allen problem: both Roth and Portnoy love, and love describing, beautiful women, which is fine. But if Alexander's such a hopelessly neurotic cad, how come he keeps ending up with such terrific babes? At times, the book drifts towards fantasy, which might be, I suppose, also fine. "Portnoy's Complaint" isn't a documentary, it's a study of a hopelessly divided psyche in which we get to see an unstoppable id fight it out with a socially conditioned superego. Of course, I imagine some readers will only be able to take so much of this: the book, good as it is, can be an exhausting to read. Alexander's subconscious, from the book's very first sentence, is stuck on blast. Even so, whether you end up loving, hating, or identifying with Alexander Portnoy, this one should be on everyone's "must read" list. show less

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is filled with bile, lyrical bile. Whether in the voice of Seymour Levov, “the Swede”, or his brother Jerry, or his father Lou, or the Swede’s daughter, Merry, or almost any other character, the potential for an excoriating rant is virtually irresistible. The anger, or envy, or contempt, or, sometimes, distorting idolatry, is released shotgun fashion – its spread is wide and indiscriminate and it may not necessarily kill what it hits. Distorting show more idolatry might sound odd in that list, but love in this novel, whether of Zuckerman for the Swede, the Swede for his daughter or his wife, or various characters for “America”, is often so blurred and overridden with wish fulfilment that it begins to feel a bit more like hate for whatever the real object of that love might be.

The novel opens with a long framing device in which Roth’s writerly alter-ego, Zuckerman, introduces us to the Swede. The Swede is almost too good to be true, and not surprisingly cracks in the façade soon begin to emerge. At that point the frame of Zuckerman is dropped and the novel continues in revelatory fashion from the Swede’s perspective. That has the effect of making the frame appear to have been superfluous. No matter. By then the rants are in full flown against LBJ, the war in Vietnam, capitalism, anti-capitalism, Nixon, intellectualism, almost each character, against the narrator (the Swede) himself, and more.

We follow the Swede from his origins in Newark to the superficially idyllic and pastoral setting of Old Rimrock, with his near-Miss-America wife, Dawn, and their stuttering daughter, Merry. Merry’s impulse to rant is nearly matched by her speech impediment. It is an articulate inarticulateness, with explosive consequences, that is mirrored by other characters, and, possibly, by Roth himself. We see pyrotechnical displays of language but I fear it may be mere display. As ever there is no counter-balance, and the reader is left with the suspicion that despite piercing insight, Roth has missed something equally obvious. Or at least that is how this reader reacts. show less