The Book of the Year?
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
Spring Books The Book of the Year? By Stanley Edgar Hyman I was abroad when Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (Random House, 274 pp., $6.95) came out, and I am still abroad, but I have been...
...She accused Portnoy (and by implication...
...It was sharply critical, while conceding the book's delights as comedy and satire...
...Alfred Kazin in the New York Review of Books observed that Roth, unlike Bellow, "writes without the aid of general ideas...
...Scarcely anyone paid much attention to Portnoy's girls, as though like him they saw them simply as concave or convex, remarkably easy to clean, and no one even mentioned that The Monkey was a human being named Mary Jane Reed...
...Panegyrics included a comparison in the Times Literary Supplement with the work of Chaplin and Svevo (Julian Mitchell in the New Statesman also said "fit to stand beside Svevo's Zeno...
...Brendan Gill in the New Yorker listed "the company of the great pornographers and scatologists," including Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Joyce, and added, "Roth has edged into the outskirts of that company"—into their petticoats or bloomers, that old reprobate Leopold Bloom would have said...
...As for the reviewers, with one or two honorable exceptions, you might better read fortune cookies...
...Roth has a matchless eye and ear and a superb talent for wild comic exaggeration, but he has not yet mastered the novel as a form, and this is scarcely a novel...
...Miss Mannes charged the book with generating revulsion, being "hard-core pornography" on the order of Gore Vidal's Myra Brecken-ridge (a particularly low blow), called Portnoy "the most disagreeable bastard who ever lived," and concluded that the book is a "mixture of bile, sperm, and self-indulgence...
...The only two denunciations I have so far seen were both ambivalent...
...Gill noted that the convention of narrating to a psychoanalyst, as well as "the pretense" that Portnoy is the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity in the Lindsay Administration (rather than a successful writer) "are both archaic nuisances...
...Roth) of being "without compassion...
...Time announced: "It is a work of farce that exaggerates and then destroys its content, leaving a gaping emptiness...
...Edmund Fuller in the Wall Street Journal said "Sometimes it is nasty...
...John Moynihan in the Sunday Telegraph called the book "a distinguished piece of literature, finely written, and often funny...
...One was a trope by Mitchell announcing that the book "arrives here flaunting its reputation ahead of it like the bloated phallus of a Greek comedian," and the other was Miss Ber-ridge's lovely idea that what Dr...
...The two all-out attacks were by Marya Mannes, in a dissent from Hicks in the Saturday Review, and Kingsley Amis in the Atlantic...
...Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the Times described the book as "a technical masterpiece...
...Elizabeth Berridge in the Telegraph, reviewing it with four other books, found it "nauseating...
...He simply said that he did not find Jewish jokes funny and thus "I did not find Mr...
...Isa Kapp, in these august pages, said: "Portnoy's Complaint may become the Book of the Year because Roth is so electrifyingly tuned in...
...By Stanley Edgar Hyman I was abroad when Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (Random House, 274 pp., $6.95) came out, and I am still abroad, but I have been following the American reviews like a breath of stale air from home...
...I think Portnoy's Complaint is a slight book, written with the left hand...
...Gill called Portnoy Roth's "hero and counterpart...
...In regard to the stylistic comparison most frequently made, with the comedy of Lenny Bruce, Roth was considerably less cooperative, telling Plimpton sharply: "I would say I was somewhat more strongly influenced in this book by a sit-down comic named Franz Kafka and a very funny bit he does called "The Metamorphosis.' " Among other oddities in the reviews were a curious hedging by the enthusiastic Greenfield ("it may very well be what is called a masterpiece—but so what...
...Granville Hicks in the Saturday Review called it "something very much like a masterpiece...
...The few English reviews I have managed to see (the book was only published here last week) have been both calmer and shorter...
...The effects "lose force through repetition," Samuels noted...
...There were a number of efforts, just this side the actionable, to equate Roth and Portnoy: Time went into some detail about how "Roth's past life resembles Alex Portnoy's...
...Josh Greenfield in the New York Times Book Review gave it an encomium so powerful-"the story finally ties together with the epiphanous neatness of any patient's last gestalt"—that I have not the slightest idea what it means, and he added that it is "the very novel that every American-Jewish writer has been trying to write" (Lionel Trilling...
...The high school yearbook description of Alex's mother ("Sophie Ginsky the boys call 'Red,'/She'll go far with her big brown eyes and her clever head") is heartbreaking in its suggestion of all that was stunted by her marriage...
...It has far too many faults to list, so that the only one I will mention is that what Roth takes to be unique to the Jewish family is actually universal lower middle class (as both Fuller and Amis come close to saying...
...and if Alex sees Miss Reed only as a dumb sexual acrobat, Roth sees her as a person, and her plea for help "to be grown up," to "be an adult," is valid and moving...
...Jekyll was afraid of about Mr...
...Samuels concluded by praising Roth's daring, adding: "But the Muses have left out of him a crucial courage that distinguishes entertainment from art...
...Beyond that, the book has virtues that the most flatulent panegyrists missed...
...and a brave effort by Gill to clear the turgid Jewish atmosphere by generous quotations from William Butler Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh...
...and Anthony Burgess in the Sunday Times, as might be expected, hailed it as "the first great novel of masturbation," and listed a variety of sordid details that add up to make it "a great joy and indicate a large verbal talent...
...Amis talked of Roth's "unconcern to invent...
...Finally, there were two ideas odder than anything I saw in the American reviews...
...but herself showed about as much compassion as Judith of Bethulia...
...Paul Carroll in Book Week called it "simply one of the two or three funniest works in American fiction" (he is the chairman of literature at Columbia College, as one could tell by his misusing the adverb "hopefully," and his true vocation seems to be that of a professor of marketing, judging by his "hunch" that Portnoy's Complaint is "the book of the year," as The Armies of the Night was of last year, In Cold Blood of 1966, and Franny and Zooey of 1961...
...He called the book "a classic," announced "we will judge our friends by what they say about this novel," defined its form, "confessional monologue," as "the dominant expressive form of our time," and concluded, "Roth has composed what for me is the most important book of my generation...
...Here Roth himself was most cooperative in an interview with George Plimpton in the New York Times Book Review, admitting "There is certainly a personal element in the novel...
...for a woman, at any rate," but conceded "such integrity in the writing, such forcefulness and witty conviction...
...Amis' tone was more melancholy...
...Moynihan called The Monkey "superb," clearly not in reference to her literacy, Burgess went into the sexual variations in considerable detail, and A. Alvarez in the Sunday Observer noted objectively, of Alex and Miss Reed, "He has a passion, which she happily shares, for oral coition...
...Richard Jones in the Times attacked it from his first sentence ("this overlong sickroom document disguised as a comic novel") to his last ("about as funny as a cry for help"), with such endearments along the way as "banal," "cheap," "smart-alick," and "trivial," but somewhere in the middle his conviction faltered, and he exclaimed: "all this is brilliantly done...
...Clifford A. Ridley in the National Observer compared Roth to a range of authors from Kafka to Cozzens, assigned the book as "required reading for anyone seriously interested in what fiction is saying about the personal themes of our time," and concluded that if it "is not the novel of the decade, it very possibly is the novel of the year...
...Hyde "could be identified with Portnoy...
...The worst of all the puffballs was Geoffrey Wolff in the Washington Post (reprinted in the international Herald Tribune...
...Everything is underlined...
...Again, I will note only one, that Roth is not Portnoy, and that Roth has compassion...
...It could still also be nothing more than a cul-de-sac...
...an odd feminist ambivalence by Miss Kapp (she "read it full of mixed feelings," and complained that the girls Portnoy used orogenitally should have been rewarded by "gratitude...
...In the American reviews I saw, only Time had noted that Portnoy and Miss Reed go to bed with a Roman whore, Newsweek had bravely said "oral" and "cunnilingus," and Miss Kapp had referred somewhat coyly to "the oral ministrations of lovers...
...The panegyrics are of the sort that might embarrass the author of the Pentateuch...
...The denunciations of Portnoy's Complaint were much more moderate than the panegyrics (where they were not, they tended to dynamite all the fish...
...Miss Kapp concluded: "We nevertheless are only too eager to escape from this airless place...
...Raymond A. Sokolov in Newsweek described Roth as "a serious writer of the first rank and no sales-hungry smut peddler...
...Roth's book funny" (he and Miss Mannes were the only American reviewers I read who didn't), described the book as "a heavily orchestrated yell of rage . . . and rage wears one down," and noted that at the spurious epigraph "my spirits fell a little," and that as he read on, "my spirits fell a little further...
...The best of the reviews I saw, and the one that seemed to me most nearly adequate to the book, was by Charles Thomas Samuels in Book World...
...There were a number of curiosities among the reviews...
...What, then, is my own view...
...The English reviewers, if they knew much less about New Jersey Jewry, were much less squeamish than their American counterparts in describing the book's gamy sexuality...
...The work is "limited in insight," it uses a narrative device "that enables Roth to make his points without having to construct a story" (Gill said essentially the same thing), and Portnoy exploits "the pathetic woman he derisively calls Monkey...
...The reviewer in Playboy said that the book has "the exuberance and gusto of Eddie Cantor singing Whoopee," and concluded, for those born too late for that magical moment, that "he has produced a small masterpiece, a comic gem...
Vol. 52 • May 1969 • No. 10
