Roth's Promise

...And for a writer to indicate promise after one or two books is, in fact, all to the good: Nothing is quite as tantalizing as observing giftedness coming into its own...

...Here is Lonoff arguing with his wife about a phone-call: "Who is it...

...Roth apparently discovered that he didn't have to labor at probing moral depths or drawing social pictures when he had such a fast-hitting method of one-liners and sketchy characterizations to fall back on...

...Why does anybody want to be so sensitive...

...This talent would take him far, all the way to the indiscretions and rantings of his first big commercial success, Portnoy's Complaint...

...The Ghost Writer the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, a young and promising writer of short stories that sound conspicuously like those in Goodbye, Columbus, speaks admiringly of Lonoff, the established older author whom he is visiting at his Berkshire hideaway: "I loved him...

...Patimkin I don't know,' Aunt Gladys said, as if she knew anybody who belonged to the Green Lane Country Club...

...Don't criticize all the time...

...It was F. Scott Fitzgerald, that connoisseur of failure, who acknowledged the tragedy that may ensue from the condition of "promisingness...

...They were written in a voice that was mordantly funny, yet inflected with a quality of seriousness...

...Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus, comprised a collection of stories and a novella...

...the motives propelling a young writer are explained to us by the older writer he has become...

...Yes, nothing less than love for this man with no illusions: love for the bluntness, the scrupulosity, the severity,, the estrangement: love for the relentless winnowing out of the babyish, preening, insatiable self...

...Willis...

...It seems to me that Roth has his finger on a truly compelling dilemma—that of divided personal and intellectual loyalties—but that he confines it to a very small arena...

...But "promising" is also a dangerous word...

...It would also hinder his developing the themes that engage him beyond the obsessional...

...The Ghost Writer testifies more to need and craving than to aspiration or risk...

...There are," he wrote with weary and discerning comprehension in the notes to The Last Tycoon, "no second acts in American lives...

...He admires you,' she said...

...You're going to call her you don't know her?'" "'Yes,' I explained...

...Every such writer, 1 imagine, is forced at some time to deal with the negative side of his promise—the possibility that he may never get there...

...His next three novels, Our Gang, The Breast and The Great American Novel, all skated on the thin ice of hostile fantasy and an increasingly wild humor...

...The ancient and the new were juxtaposed in the title novella, Goodbye, Columbus, to startling effect...

...What is he so compassionate about all the time...

...and, remarkably, Roth enabled us to grasp this struggle almost entirely through dialogue...

...The voice, then?something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head," as Lonoff describes it to Zuckerman—is still intact, but it is still trapped...

...Who is it...

...Inspiration strikes and they go for the phone...

...one saw how cultures accommodate and resist each other...

...It has struck me recently that "promising" is an adjective dear to American hearts...

...A cousin's a cousin...

...Even Roth's celebrated problematic Jewishness gets a rather tired nod here in the form of Zuckerman's fantasy involving Amy Bellette, a young assistant of Lonoffs, whom he envisions as a resuscitated Anne Frank...

...You have to learn to tell people no...

...What we get is a handful of perceptions about domestic trauma and artistic imperiousness, and some vintage dialogue...

...Who is she...

...He was writing about American Jews—both the assimilated ones, who take the land of plenty in their well-heeled stride, and the bewildered ones, who look backwards to the insular, clearly-defined world of the shtetl—with the mixture of derision and affection that comes from the too-lucid understanding of a writer straddling two histories himself...

...Always so greatly moved...

...How did you meet her...

...the satire was directed intrapsychically rather than at national pastimes or institutions...

...It concerned a group of floundering post-adolescents, and it evoked the atmosphere of emotional stagnation as much by the settings—the academic communities of Iowa and Chicago—as by the malaise of the characters...

...Some girl I met today...

...A head full of ideas, every one of them stupid...

...he convincingly grappled with the besetting anxieties of manhood that later become suspended in caricature...

...Roth explored this side of himself—the old-style moralist—once more, and markedly less successfully, in When She Was Good, a bleak portrait of feminine willfulness...

...Here is the opening conversation between Aunt Gladys and Neil Klugman, after he has just held rich Brenda Patimkin's glasses for her at the swimming-pool: "'Who are you calling' my Aunt Gladys asked...

...Instead of opening it up to the stratagems and demands of the world out there, he has lingered with the battles that are familiar to him and to us...

...My Life as a Man signalled yet another adjustment in Roth's treatment of his fictional material...

...Unfortunately, this is never really attended to by the plot...

...Not the genius again...

...The consequences were disastrous, because as a bad boy Roth just isn't bad—i.e., inventive—enough: He is still trying to shock Mother...

...Doris wouldn't introduce me to the guy who drains the pool, Aunt Gladys...

...And it's not him...

...The focus turned sharply inward...

...In between his critically-acclaimed first book and his best-selling fourth, Roth did try a more fully conceptualized approach...

...After that the tragic muse was abandoned in favor of the scandalously comic: Portnoy beat his breast on Dr...

...All that sensitivity...

...Spielvo-gel's couch and the public responded with appreciative laughter...

...The Ghost Writer is a slight book about almost-major themes...

...a deficient son to loving parents...

...a vulnerable male among predatory females...

...It was uniquely suited to the lightly-borne anguish of Roth's fictional situations and capable of sustaining interest in the fairly specialized conflicts of which it spoke...

...The author recaptured some of the poignancy of his first book by the simple act of retracing his steps back to the germinating obsessions: being a dark Jew among golden Goyim...

...It's not him...

...I'll introduce myself.'" "'Casanova,' she said, and went back to preparing my uncle's dinner...

...I didn't really meet her...

...You,' she said...

...We are caught instead in the web that Roth spins from deep inside of him, and the entanglements are, as the last line of My Life as a Man shows, consumingly primary: "You being you...

...Letting Go seems to me to contain some of Roth's best writing...

...Her last name is Patimkin...

...We are especially fond of applying it to writers and other artists, I think, because it implies a receptive largesse, a willingness on our part to judge by what is suggested rather than by what is achieved...

...Roth's impeccable ear not only captured what was being said, but what was left unsaid as well...

...It is, alas, precisely Roth-alias-Zuckerman's "babyish, preening, insatiable self" that inhabits the center of the novel and directs the proceedings...

...Would I have said you were here...

...a dilatory arrival at the gates of maturity...

...All that wonder,' said Lonoff to his wife...

...In this and his next novel, The Professor of Desire, there is much that is witty and much that is touching, but it is the feeling of claustrophobia that emerges most strongly...

...Doris introduced you...

...I saw her...

...I suppose the novel can be read as a story about the conflicting allegiances to Art and Life, and the betrayals involved therein...

...The regressive, infantile streak that had always been a component of his temperament was allowed to usurp his more subtle and considered traits...

...Always on the brink of tears...

...People like that make fifty calls a day...

...It is time that he dared to move on...

...Letting Go, his second novel, was a lengthy work of almost Hardyesque sobriety...

...it exerts pressure on those it is bestowed upon, for behind the generosity of assessment lies great expectations, great demands...

...And me\ This me who is me being me and none other...

...I've said I was sorry...

...The outside world—where children grow up into parents, where coming into one's own is less a matter of free-wheeling choices than of gradually receding options—has dimmed...

...He has the right wrong opinion on everything...

...The novel was a turnabout in being distinctly nonethnic—problems caused by Jewishness now ceded to problems caused by humanness—and self-consciously literary: The street-wise, punchy story-teller of Goodbye, Columbus was replaced by a brooding, cerebral spirit, an earnest forger of the links joining the exigencies of Life to the meditations of Art...