The Facts
Roth, Philip
It is unrealistic to expect Philip Roth to entitle his book The Facts and then to open it with "I was born . . ." Roth's notion of Vust the facts, ma'am" consists in preambling the book with a...
...Although it was excerpted in Vanity Fair, it's not that kind of book...
...It is unrealistic to expect Philip Roth to entitle his book The Facts and then to open it with "I was born . . ." Roth's notion of Vust the facts, ma'am" consists in preambling the book with a letter to the hero of his last four novels, Nathan Zuckerman, in which he asks Zuckerman's opinion on the manuscript of The Facts...
...Thematically, it would have been unrealistic to expect anything else...
...This reviewer could not resist the temptation to follow Roth's format...
...So there is nothing wrong with reliving your charmed kosher childhood...
...Therapy may be claimed a (weak) reason for one's first book—not the seventeenth...
...you needed to be superior, too—and you got it in spades...
...There is heartfelt love and tenderness in the way you describe your father's striving for success in the gentile-dominated world of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, or your mother's innate sense of decorum—or even the loving care that they never failed to give you...
...this book to be filled with celebrity poop will be disappointed...
...You've come a long way from the sealskin coat that your Mom used to wrap you in...
...but it's all a game on your part, as they'll learn at the end...
...Since when does a character want his author to write anything but a sequel...
...Who needs facts...
...Which is quoted more often, Our Gang or Portnoy's Complaint...
...Caveat Emptor: those who expect David Gurevich, a New York writer, is the author of Travels with Dubinsky and Clive (Viking...
...And why should you write about slavery or Vietnam, if you feel you still have important things to say about yourself...
...When it comes to nice Jewish girls, all you do is bemoan having ignored Gayle Milman...
...There's plenty of young Zuckermans around to deconstruct your texts for their theses, and you'll get your own Peter Manso [that's the guy who compiled 600—or was it 6,000?—pages on Norman Mailer] before long, too...
...Gentile in modern America, and, of course, Women—shiksas, actually...
...Both in volume and in intensity, Josie bullies her way into the limelight, and eventually there comes a dreaded moment when even the most devoted fan of yours will join the skeptics and cry out, "Enough already...
...You open with a long-winded ten-page letter to Zuckerman, ostensibly to ask his opinion on whether this should be published (as if you didn't know the answer...
...By '56, you're on the fast track, your prayers answered one by one: your stories are acclaimed, you teach at the University of Chicago, and you sport "a Brooks Brothers University Shop suit...
...The book itself, then, is an even 150 pages long: five chapters covering your life from nice Jewish boyhood in Newark to the bestsellerdom of Portnoy...
...So, parity with goyim was not enough...
...By now you've calmed down enough to describe it without the exclamation marks of Portnoy's Complaint...
...the one with the faked pregnancy test, in My Life as a Man...
...D ear Roth, I never shared the skepticism of the "enough already" variety that many felt toward your coming autobiography...
...I can't tell you how sorry I am about the physical ordeal and subsequent "crack-up" you went through last year, as well as about your mother's death, but this pre-prologue [there's a "Prologue," too] is so full of banalities and rhetorical questions and insecurity-generated explications that, had it been written by someone else, I would have stopped reading it then and there, illness or no illness...
...Josie the waitress, the battered divorcee, the mother of two (taken from her by force, she maintains)—were you listening to the heartbeat of America or to the voice of your own liberal guilt...
...As for me, your fictions have always been good enough...
...And no matter how evil she was (the combination of redundant evidence and the stridency of your tone does not serve you well, any judge THE FACTS: A NOVELIST'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY Philip Roth/Farrar Straus Giroux/$17.95 David Gurevich THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 51...
...The glow of Newark gemutlichkeit, of baseball and bagels, follows you to Bucknell College, where you get the first inkling of your Big Themes: Jew vs...
...You seem generous to your exegesists by supplying copious margin notes: the episode of you and Polly discovered in bed by the landlady was used in When She Was Good, you say...
...The entanglement—brief happiness, miserable marriage, and a bitter battle for divorce—lasted twelve long years...
...but mostly to reason this book into being...
...There is little about it that students of yours have not read before, in My Life as a Man and elsewhere...
...To be your own man, justone thing is missing: a woman who would not merely be Aryan to her toes, but who would be a "victim, a dispossessed refugee from a sociobiological background to which my own was deemed . . . subservient...
...Your sorties to the world outside never worked quite as well as your internal excavations: Who is remembered better, Lucy Nelson or David Kepesh...
...Don't you find poetic justice in the fact that, long before her lawyers bled you to death, you yourself helped her in hounding her first husband...
...Now, there was a true free spirit—yet how do you know it would have turned out differently from the way it did with Polly, your first shiksa...
...I just never saw any reason for you to divulge the facts...
Vol. 21 • November 1988 • No. 11
