Roth in Progress

...We expect quite reasonably that the main fascination of a novel will inhere in its persons and places...

...Considering many possibilities at the same time resembles too closely the rest of modern culture, with its motley, simultaneous attack on our senses and minds...

...The few characters we can empathize with show up in words, not action...

...But at least it can be said that this is not an empty novel...

...Nor were Zuckerman's "Salad Days" any different: At that time he put on his finicky act with Sharon Shatsky, daughter of the Zipper King, whose sexy letters were, to an admirer of Mrs...

...For these, Roth believes, unman his heroes and ill equip their creator to contend with the present reality...

...Yet if he is indeed striking the cosmic note, one wonders why he resorts to a braying and offensive narrator, and a few sordid, nerve-jangling episodes to represent an entire marriage...

...Yet the more the depictions differ, the more they remain the same...

...Zuckerman marries Lydia for similarly abstract reasons, for the "moral glamor" he attaches to her dismal past?and despite the fact that he finds her body abhorrent...

...But Roth is too intensely inside to care where he is outside, and ascetic enough that he passes up without a qualm the chance to describe, in two different sections of the book, the enchanting burnt-orange aspect of Rome...

...But of course, you know best how to exploit my memory for high artistic purposes...

...Perhaps Roth will be sufficiently fired by this model of directness from his own book to settle in the future for one aspect of the truth and abide by it, whatever its inadequacies...

...Her gait particularly displeased me: mannish, awkward, it took on a kind of rolling quality when she tried to move quickly, and in my mind associated with images of cowhands and merchant seamen...

...No matter how awesome the spectacle of a writer so eager to capture every facet of the truth that he subjects us forcibly to the ignoble, the unbalanced and the disgusting in ourselves, the theme of an artist's progress is after all a highly specialized one...

...I think a phallus would increase your sales...

...In this book Roth's interest is restricted to the process of getting married, the moment of social entrapment, the shape and flavor of the bait...

...Maureen of "My True Story" is a tough gamin with a lantern jaw, who tricks Tarnopol into marrying her by pretending she is pregnant...

...What made Portnoy's Complaint a best seller was not really the flamboyant vocabulary or the lurid sexual images, but the complaint itself: the encroachment of the Jewish family on the outlook and imagination of its vulnerable offspring...

...When [Maureen] drilled, she really struck pay dirt...

...Is there no bottom to your guilty conscience...

...There is, for instance, Tarnopol's sister, a sharp-witted woman who writes: "Thanks for the long letter and the two new stories, three artful documents springing from the same hole in your head...

...Still, Roth would probably admit that in marriage there is no such thing as a clean dichotomy of victims and victimizers...

...My Life as a Man can boast an ironic, recondite source of harmony that inadvertently touches us: The writer is so precisely the man?compulsively literary, modern, fastidious, hooked on the seven types of ambiguity, and extraordinarily inclined to wax wroth...

...Even in eternity, after her death in an auto accident, he sends her copies of his stories and envisions her derisive (though now more sophisticated) comments: "How do you intend to portray me this time...

...Fired by such a model, Tarnopol marries Maureen not because of the pregnancy she claims, but because she earlier led a thoroughly chaotic life and because "she was also something of a rough customer...

...So speaks the not too winsome Zuckerman, a typical Roth hero, begrudging himself and others the smallest satisfaction...

...To demonstrate his travail, Roth has incorporated into his book two short stories by his hero, Peter Tarno-pol?Salad Days" and "Courting Disaster...

...You know I admire your work . . . but the fact is you couldn't create a Kitty or a Levin if your life depended on it...

...Good luck with My Martyrdom as a Man...

...that he mourns not for Tarnopol, but for all of us who are "trapped" in modern marriage...

...His exacerbated cadences notwithstanding, Roth has always had the knack of locating his fiction in common derangements...

...Writers & Writing ROTH IN PROGRESS BY ISA KAPP p m hilip Roth's taunting new novel, My Life as a Man (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 330 pp., $8.95), is a brilliant documentary on the writing of fiction, with its taxing discipline and harsh principles of selection...

...In "My True Story" the problem of veracity is more tentatively pursued we are invited to assess the reliability of an obsessive narrator no less strident and rancorous than Alexander Portnoy And the plot reconnoiters back and forth in events as if it were some Indian scout cutting brush in the forest of the psyche...

...Lydia of "Courting Disaster" is exactly the opposite, drab, self-deprecating and reluctant to impose herself...

...Deceivers exist, to be sure, but usually they have accessories, spouses who somewhere deep down stand to profit, or think they stand to profit, by being deceived...

...that he is simply fooling us with his avowedly pathological hero...

...although she tries to warn Zuckerman off, he insists on marriage...

...Now Roth is confronting us with a relatively new phenomenon in the relations between men and women, a kind of lethal emotional democracy in which reserve has completely evaporated and no demand is considered too presumptuous...

...To add to our perplexity, My Life as a Man parades as a novel about a disastrous marriage...

...The main distinction between the two versions of marrying presented in My Life as a Man is a literary one...

...But there is not a word in it on the affections or habits or vexations of the married state An odd omission for Roth, whose most continuous achievement as a writer has been to summon up the overseasoned, tenderized atmosphere of family life, the half-delicious, half-unwholesome surrenders to being mothered or brothered...

...for all its excesses...

...Is there no other source available for your art...

...Unfortunately, how and why Tarnopol "squandered his manhood" take a far greater hold on the author's imagination than on ours...

...Holding your head on a plate...

...To us and to Dr...

...My model of reality, deduced from reading the great masters, had at its heart intractability...

...Dalloway and The Ambassadors, "facile," "conceived at a primitive level...

...Courting Disaster" is basically objective, sequential, decorous, to the extent that Roth can muster these attributes of fiction he once admired...

...j^_n any case, Roth's argument at this point in his career appears to be more with Literature than with modern life...

...Shifting his angle of vision until we are dizzy with astigmatism, Roth previews his method, reviews his own work, raises simultaneous accusations and defenses, and even outfoxes himself: Reviewers are actually indicting him for the sins of narcissism and lack of generosity that he exposes in Tarnopol/Zuckerman...

...Stuffed to the gills with great fiction-entranced not by cheap romances like Madame Bovary, but by Madame Bovary-I now expected to find in everyday experience that same sense of the difficult and deadly earnest that informed the novels I admired most...

...Beyond that, he may be telling us that we enter marriage as much for harassment (growth through suffering, as a European philosopher more conventionally put it) as for gratification...

...In both cases, however, Roth indicates it is Literature that has played a trick on the well-read hero...

...He mulls over the craft of fiction as a woman might over an old lover who did her wrong?reconstructing his relationship to it, and discarding mannerly conventions and moral pretensions...

...Watching her run to meet me on some Chicago street????After we had become lovers-I would positively recoil...

...One of the displeasures of reading My Life as a Man is that it is overly seismographic, trying to incorporate everything that is rife in the environment psychoanalysis, the role of women, the struggle toward orgasm (needless to report, not successful...

...Spielvogel (the psychoanalyst who had the last word in Porlnoy's Complaint and who here does a repeat performance of impassive common sense and hardy resistance to the artistic temperament), Tarnopol protests that he is the ordained victim of this tenacious little harpy...

...And under the guise of rescuing us from the constricting ideals of old-fashioned literature, he writes in a wildly polyphonic style, rendering the same marriage debacle twice first in "Courting Disaster," where Tarnopol has been renamed Nathan Zuckerman, then in the novel's major portion, "My True Story," whose very title is mockingly borrowed from confessional pulp magazines, and not wholly out of contempt...

...It is only to be expected that in maturity, Tarnopol, again the Roth hero, repeatedly consigns to Hell and brimstone the scrappy wife who fights him with half-digested phrases out of psychoanalysis and class struggle...

...Thus we get the feeling that Roth is being too clever by half...

...I know of nothing as fascinating on the subject, except the notebooks and prefaces of Henry James...