3/22/2023 0 Comments Philip roth man reader![]() A slim, uncompromising fable of a self-centered artist facing the abyss. Roth’s mordant twist on a medieval funeral play, about a man abandoned by all his gifts before death (though here he’s more betrayer than betrayed). Roth’s quasi memoir (a boy named Philip Roth grows up in Newark) comes wrapped in a richly imagined alternate universe: Charles Lindbergh becomes president, keeps America out of World War II, and offers to the nation’s Jews a neighborly hug that slowly becomes a noose. The tale of another Newark hero of Zuckerman’s (this time a lefty radio star done in by McCarthy, with help from his ex-wife’s memoir), this sweeping and poignant novel suffered by comparison with American Pastoral (not to mention the gossip over Roth’s own memoirizing ex-wife, Claire Bloom). Martin Amis has called it, not necessarily negatively, “perhaps the most cramped and stubborn exercise in self-examination known to modern letters.” Runs the gamut of self-absorption, from brilliantly taut to tedious. This quartet (now available in a Library of America edition) takes us halfway through the life cycle of Roth’s success, from the 23-year-old apprentice visiting his reclusive hero ( The Ghost Writer) to the mid-thirties celebrity wrestling with his fame ( Zuckerman Unbound) to the fortysomething superstar scouring Czechoslovakia for literary talent ( The Prague Orgy). The birth of randy, combative, brilliant Nathan Zuckerman, the vehicle for Roth’s career-long thought experiment about the existential drama of his own career. Roth’s nascent obsessions are evident (sex, class, assimilation), but not yet his trademark voice. ![]() Roth’s debut is a brisk novella about Neil Klugman, a likable kid from the working-class side of Newark who falls for Brenda Patimkin of tony Short Hills. The Zuckerman book’s real subject is dutiful ex-jock “Swede” Levov, whose family, and entire worldview, falls apart after his radicalized daughter, Merry, bombs their idyllic New Jersey town’s general store. It’s also hilarious.Īrguably Roth’s best novel, certainly his most mature. Notorious for a scene of graveside masturbation (take that, liver!), the book pushes Roth’s obsession with sex and death to its limits. When a second Philip Roth turns up in Jerusalem, using the author’s fame to fight anti-Semitism and agitate for the re-dispersal of the Jews, the actual Roth intercedes-and ends up spying for Israel.īrilliant, smutty, and marvelously nuts, this is the story of an unemployed, priapic puppeteer grieving the loss of his nymphomaniacal, adulterous soulmate Drenka. Roth’s funniest, smartest, most readable experiment in metafiction. In a long therapy session, “the Raskolnikov of jerking off” unloads all the neuroses and fixations of the hyperarticulate Jew, who seems a stock character today only because Portnoy was such a seminal one. Roth finds his voice (or his first great one) through one of postwar lit’s most memorable protagonists.
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