Sorry but this man represents Judaism worse than if his writings on the subject were written by a raving anti-Semite.
His was a secularist who no longer believed.
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Philip Roth's misogynist streak was an ugly trait, which he seemed proud to place on display.
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Truly, we have lost a giant of literature. There is no one to replace him. At least, no one living.
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Yes, very rarely you feel grief for a public figure, but there is some of that after hearing of Roth's passing.
But thanks for quoting from Portnoy. I laughed once again, almost had tears down my cheek.
8
I, too, grieve at the death of Philip Roth. Though he had announced the end to his production of fine and interesting books. there were always chances to hear his voice in an opinion column, or an interview.
Feminists have every right to complain that male writers don't get women right, a deficiency that is being currently corrected by the deluge of women writers who are restoring the balance with fiction written from the woman's point of view. Male writers like Roth, who focus on the lives of male protagonists, necessarily show female characters as they are seen through the eyes of these men, or at least as they impinge on the protagonists' lives.
In Roth's little-read third novel, WHEN SHE WAS GOOD, however, his main character is a woman, and in my opinion he did a terrific job of portraying her. He brought off the difficult trick, which I've never seen anywhere else in fiction, of creating enormous sympathy for his heroine as a victimized child and adolescent, and then showing how she gradually becomes a terrible, hateful person as an adult.
The book is fiction, but it arose from a devastating era in Roth's own life, when he married a girlfriend who pretended to be pregnant in order to get him to marry her, and then made his life hell until they finally separated. She was mentally unbalanced, and refused to divorce him until she died in an auto accident years later.
His portrait of her is a complex mix of sympathy and horror, but it is convincing and true to life.
10
Equating Roth to Picasso is utterly preposterous. The writer shows he nothing about art history or cultural influences.
4
Cx: he knows nothing...
"All writers are ambitious," I just started to write, then deleted it recalling Dickinson, whose compulsive outpourings of her soul gave no thought to publication or entry into a pantheon, now Kafka comes to mind, whose writing could probably be characterized as a form of therapy to cope w/ brutalization he perceived in his life & social & political milieu; Proust, Dosteovsky, Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy.... the great novelists are driven by LOFTY visions, a sense of the profound that demands literary expression. Their art reaches the sublime because of the depth of their fascination w/ the human condition, their ability to experience, convey, & trigger awe at the range of human experience from its basest to its noblest heights.
Roth was part of a generation that self-consciously (self-consciousness/absorption/narcissism) sought to locate profundity in the most mudane & local, in the "Leaves of Grass" (masturbatory) tradition: "I sing myself" that reached complete expression in Portnoy.
While other writers of Mr. Roth's cohort like Bellow wrote elevated art treating the mundane, Roth, somewhat like Mailer, sought & created a mimesis of utter & complete self-absorption, as if art should be a distillation of personal psychotherapeutic venting, the more personal, mundane & ultimately sexual & Freudian, the better.
Roth & Mailer help consolidate the narcisstic "me, myself, I, & my insatiable needs" generation that gave us Boesky...Weinstein.......FACEBOOK self-display & $.
7
Considering one esteemed literary critic, who wrote a book on Portnoy's Complaint, described trying to remember the details of the novel as being akin to trying to remember a Picasso composition, it doesn't seem like too preposterous a comparison.
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