The tone is at once nostalgic and embittered, rollicking and sad, and the juxtaposition of domestic conventions with the wild masturbatory fantasies of young Alex Portnoy, achingly accurate in every respect, including the highly colored one of the "castrating" Jewish mama, often equals the pathetic brilliance of some of the short stories of Gogol and Babel, besides being, in its rather idiosyncratic way, a closer look at the "generation gap" than anything that has yet appeared in print. The truer one is best represented by the remarkable section called "Jewish Blues." Here the theme is adolescent rage, middle class New Jersey misery, and filial ambivalence ("a Jewish man with parents alive is a 15-year-old boy, and will remain a 15-year-old boy till they die!"). There are two voices in Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth's quasi-autobiographical tour de force, though both voices are the voices of the hero.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |