Smash your head on the cock rock
I wanted to know Philip Roth. Or, more accurately, I didn’t want to not know Philip Roth. People talk him up like he’s Mr. Important–ofttimes people who are smart.
A shameful percentage of my delvings-into-things begin with the same impulse: not curiosity, but fear of humiliation. What if the world finds out that I have never read X, and hence I am exposed as stupid, callow, vulgar–as Nabokov would have it, poshlost? And hence I set about dragging my sorry ass out of the darkness and into the light.
Very frequently, I end up disappointed. In fact, gentle reader, disappointment is my main existential mode! Week after week, I blab to my lawyer, and she tilts her head and says, “That must’ve been so disappointing for you.” Each time, with exquisite empathy. That’s what I pay her for, I guess: to never get tired of saying that.
Can you guess where this is going?
I began with the Zuckerman books. The first one, the Ghost Writer, was actually not so bad. I could read it. Ya know? In it, a pretentious and self-absorbed young writer goes to meet his hero, a pretentious and self-absorbed older writer, at his pastoral Berkshires house. Many wry musings about The Writing Life, and then, the juicy part: the young writer witnesses a drama involving the older writer’s wife and mistress, and has a long and quite lovely fantasy about Anne Frank. (Ain’t got nothing on the best Anne Frank fantasy of all time, howevs.)
Next comes Zuckerman Bound, which made me want to die. The pretentious and self-absorbed young Zuckerman is now middle-aged and famous, and no longer seems like a real person… I don’t mean that his fame has changed him and he’s a different guy now and blahblahblah. I mean there is a fundamental problem with this book: it’s all plywood backdrops and simulated weather. Have you ever gotten the feeling that a writer is playing with dolls?
Okay, so enough Zuckerman. Onward!
Next came the coup de grace. For me, at least: even if David Gates or Henry James tells me that I’ve chosen the wrong Philip Roth books, and if I would only just read such-and-such my impression will be corrected, I will bang my fist on the table and say NO! I am finished with this drivel.
Because, Portnoy’s Complaint.
You guys, I try to be a Big Girl when it comes to misogyny in art. For example, I like that Smog song about women wanting to be hit. Sometimes emotional honesty is ugly! I like to think I can take misogyny. Or understand it on its own terms, put it in context, whatevs, if there’s something redeemable there.
And I had heard that Portnoy’s Complaint was misogynistic, but I figured a book about frantic and incessant masturbation can’t be all bad! Wokka wokka.
You guys, it’s all bad.
Okay, it’s written in the first person, so perhaps it’s unsophisticated of me to assume that Alexander Portnoy’s attitudes are Philip Roth’s attitudes. It’s just that there is something so fucking gleeful about Alexander Portnoy’s misogyny. Like at the end, when he goes to Israel and meets this stridently political kibbutz girl who is half his age, and she looks like his mother, and she blathers on about how diaspora Jews are broken and twisted and the only way to be authentic and free is to be an Israeli Jew, and Portnoy considers marrying her and having litters of children, but then instead he tries to rape her! And fails because he can’t get it up! Whoops! Because he’s in Israel and surrounded by Jewish girls, and he only fucks shiksas! Hahahahah!
Blech.
And then there’re paragraphs like this:
What are they, after all, these Jewish women who raised us up as children? In Calabria you see their suffering counterparts sitting like stones in the churches, swallowing all that hideous Catholic bullshit; in Calcutta they beg in the streets, or if they are lucky, are off somewhere in a dusty field hitched up to a plow… Only in America, Rabbi Golden, do these peasants get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles–and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech–look, if cows could talk they would say things just as idiotic. Yes, yes, maybe that’s the solution then: think of them as cows, who have been given the twin miracles of speech and mah-jongg. Why not be charitable in one’s thinking, right, Doctor?
I actually find I can’t summon the energy to delve into this very deeply. I will point out that no man in the book is subjected to the same sort of vitriol–especially not Portnoy’s father. Nope, Portnoy venerates his dad’s magnificent cock (srsly!) and blames all of dude’s shortcomings (passive! cowardly! chronically constipated!) on his mother. Also, does he actually think peasant women in India and Italy don’t have any opinions?
Oh, and the writing is terrible! Sitting like stones? There’s a simile from Central Casting if I ever saw one. Swallowing… bullshit? That’s either the wrong verb or the wrong object. And cows who have been given the twin miracles of speech and mah-jongg? First off, gifts are given, but miracles, no. And second of all, it’s just cheap. Jewish Mother 101. Maybe it felt shocking and fresh in 1969, but in 2008 it feels dated and obvious.
That’s the trouble with this book. Sometimes a book’s prose is shoddy but people still embrace it because of its ideas. Sometimes–and this is a miracle, when you think about it–great ideas can transcend bad writing. But Roth’s ideas are just as sloppy and sophomoric as his sentences. Portnoy’s Complaint is a great big Fuck You to Mommy, and a childish attempt to shock. To which I say: yawn. Philip Roth is King of Poshlost!
So why–oh why oh why oh why–is he so fucking famous? DESPAIR. This makes me want to give up on books and devote my life to the minute inspection of some other more worthy kind of art, like television–everybody says TV is really good now!–or deranged YouTube videos.
But no. I’m like Don Quixote, yo. (Wince: never read it.) So I’m on to Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize and Nabokov-proclaimed “miserable mediocrity”–we can only dream of what he would’ve called Roth! Bellow’s women “eat green salads and drink human blood,” which is at least marginally more clever than the miracles of speech and mah-jongg.
But I’m fifty pages into Herzog, and dude clearly has a creepy obsession with women’s noses. They’re constantly “moving,” “working,” “flaring,” and so on. Alexander Portnoy’s shrink would probably find that positively fascinating.
Leave a Reply