Roth, Philip

Average customer rating:

Brilliant 21st-century Secular Morality Tale
This book will make Roth fans happy.
No answers
Audience Specific
A feel-bad novel

Everyman
Philip Roth
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Terrorist: A Novel
Suite Francaise
Absurdistan: A Novel
Digging to America
The Emperor's Children

ASIN: 0307277712
Release Date: 2007-04-10

Book Description

Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The bestselling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.

The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.

The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

Customer Reviews:

Brilliant 21st-century Secular Morality Tale.......2007-06-22

"Everyman" by Phillip Roth is a 21st-century secular morality tale. It deals with one fairly average and unexceptional man's journey toward death. It begins and ends with the unnamed protagonist's funeral. In between, through sentimental recollections, bitter regrets, and flailing against the unfairness of life, we bear witness to this man's life. Overall, Everyman's existence is not a pretty picture. But Roth's telling is so magnificent, so utterly gorgeous and brilliant, that the reader is in awe throughout. The book is sparse. Every word counts. The reading is surprisingly fast and satisfying despite the gravity of the subject matter.

Everyman begins life as a sickly young boy, obsessed with health and death. Much of the book is taken up with details of his medical history. Many of his recollections concern illnesses and deaths among his colleagues and friends. We soon find out that Roth's Everyman is a very self-centered man with an apparent, in-born, less-than-average capacity for empathy. He is completely estranged from his two sons, who are unable to forgive him for divorcing their mother, his first wife. But his daughter still adores him. Adultery and lack of control over his sexual appetite for young women are central to the current of his life. He marries three times; learns the jewelry trade from his father; does a stint in the Navy; goes into advertising; and finally becomes a successful New York advertising executive. But overall, his tale is full of betrayal, lies, regrets, hopelessness, loss, and suffering. At the age of about 70--after 20 years of multiple major operations--he ends up in an affluent retirement community. It is located near the same seaside resort where he spent summers as a young boy. At first he looks forward to it--something like a prolonged vacation. But he quickly finds himself surrounded by the ill and dying, alone, bored, angry at the degeneration of his body, and ultimately disappointed in everything.

In an interview, Roth admits that he purposefully gave the book the same title as the 16th-century morality play, and that he avidly reread and studied that medieval text during the writing of this book. In Roth's secular, 21st-century reinterpretation, his message is clear: in the balance of life, we are who we are; we have done what we have done; we can regret our bad deeds, but we should not apologize for them--to do so would be to deny the reality of our human condition; in the end, all that is important is family and friends--after death, there is nothingness.

In the medieval text, the all-consuming importance of a true confession and the sacrament of forgiveness occur midway and are pivotal to the message. Perhaps to strengthen his secular moral reinterpretation, Roth places Everyman's strongest moral defenses--this one concerning his two sons' abandonment of him--at the center of this modern text. Here Roth writes: "He had done what he did the way that he did it, as they did what they did the way they did it. Was their steadfast posture of unforgivingness any more forgivable, or any less harmful in its effect?" (p. 94)

In Roth's worldview, we are who we are; we do what we must; we can regret, but it is not necessary to ask forgiveness. The human condition contains both good and bad; we just have to accept ourselves as we are, and others as they are, and go about the business of living the best we can.

I read this book because I drive a 300-mile roundtrip every week to an affluent retirement community like the one described in this book to visit my aging parents (96 and 89). Although my own parents are still fully independent and happily together (after 73 years of marriage), I have met many other residents who often make me wonder what their experience in that place must be.

This was my first Roth. I was in awe over the power of his writing, and I will definitely read more. I recommend this book highly.

This book will make Roth fans happy........2007-06-20

I know why people like Philip Roth. I understand why people of a certain age and income level really like "Everyman." He's a great writer. I can't really find fault with the way he put the book together. Same with "American Pastoral" (though I did think it a little longer than necessary). And I imagine that I could go on reading Roth and being impressed with his skills and observations. And I'll probably read a few more of his books this summer.

But ultimately, I believe his skill comes in making a fundamentally tedious experience--the experience of middle class America--interesting.

I know that's not fair. A good book is about more than it's subject. But I can't think about "Everyman" without getting mildly angry. I felt no sympathy for the protagonist, and little more for the characters that surround him. The ends of their lives were faced with all the comforts and privilege of middle America. The protagonist in "Everyman" recognizes his mistakes, he examines them, turns them over as though they were curious relics.

It is a good book on a somewhat well worn subject.

No answers.......2007-06-16

I'm glad I borrowed it from the library rather than buying it, because I'll never read it again. Roth is a fine craftsman, but has little to teach about aging and nothing about death itself. He must be working out his own demons. No, this is not "everyman," it is a single man portrayed through the colored lens of Roth. He honestly portrays the utter hopelessness of the material world, yet simply piles hopelessness upon hopelessness. His main characer is a lone man utterly entombed by attachment to the body.

Perhaps Roth has a followup? A book with hope? If he has none, then perhaps he should get out of his own head and start exploring the spiritual side of life.

Audience Specific.......2007-06-10

I remember back when this book was first released, I simply could not fork over the hardcover price for something so thin. In retrospect, I'm glad I waited for the soft cover.

I can't say I disliked Everyman, but I also can't say I especially liked it. Roth is an expert wordsmith and his plot and characters are well conceived, and the actual structure of the timeline in this story is interestingly executed, but it's ultimately a story that I simply did not care about. Perhaps it is geared towards an older crowed due to its dealings with elderly mortality, and, as a younger man, I had trouble relating.

That said, Roth is certainly deserving of all the accolades he's collected over the years, but in the end, Everyman did not capture this reader's imagination.

A feel-bad novel.......2007-06-10

It's a rather depressing thought, but in real life, there are no happy endings. We are all trained from our fiction reading and watching to believe that all can end well: the villain is defeated, the girl (or guy) is won over, the sports championship is taken. In real life, however, these events may occur, but they are really only happy moments in the middle of the life story. The only real conclusion is death, a point driven home in Philip Roth's Everyman.

It is no spoiler to say that the main character (left unnamed) will die during the story; his death is established on the first page. The brief novel begins with his funeral and then looks back at his life. The protagonist is more-or-less an everyman: although in its own way unique, it is also not all that uncommon: he was an advertising man who wound up being married three times and having three children. His life had neither great accomplishments or fantastic failures: his greatest victory is probably his loving daughter and his worst failing is his own nature that allowed him to cheat on his wives.

Roth is considered one of the great American writers, and certainly the writing in this story is good enough to merit four stars. On the other hand, thematically, I found the novel to be rather dark: it is nearly a two-hundred page reminder that even if we avoid accidents, the best we can hope for is a life that gets worse and worse as we get older: more and more illness and greater loneliness as our friends and family also go away. Everyman shows that good writing is not always enough; if a book is too grim, it may not be worth the effort. After all, if we only have a limited time, why should we spend it feeling unnecessarily depressed?

Average customer rating:

Lindbergh disappeared and everything went back to normal?
5 for insight and relevance...3 for execution...let's call it a 4
M. Rufo
A Great Read: Entertaining, Good Characters, and a Great Story
The plot for non American readers

The Plot Against America
Philip Roth
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Alternate History | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Science Fiction & Fantasy Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

American Pastoral
Everyman
Saturday
The Human Stain: A Novel
The March: A Novel

ASIN: 1400079497
Release Date: 2005-09-27

Amazon.com

"What if" scenarios are often suspect. They are sometimes thinly veiled tales of the gospel according to the author, taking on the claustrophobic air of a personal fantasia that can't be shared. Such is not the case with Philip Roth's tour de force, The Plot Against America. It is a credible, fully-realized picture of what could happen anywhere, at any time, if the right people and circumstances come together.

The Plot Against America explores a wholly imagined thesis and sees it through to the end: Charles A. Lindbergh defeats FDR for the Presidency in 1940. Lindbergh, the "Lone Eagle," captured the country's imagination by his solo Atlantic crossing in 1927 in the monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis, then had the country's sympathy upon the kidnapping and murder of his young son. He was a true American hero: brave, modest, handsome, a patriot. According to some reliable sources, he was also a rabid isolationist, Nazi sympathizer, and a crypto-fascist. It is these latter attributes of Lindbergh that inform the novel.

The story is framed in Roth's own family history: the family flat in Weequahic, the neighbors, his parents, Bess and Herman, his brother, Sandy and seven-year-old Philip. Jewishness is always the scrim through which Roth examines American contemporary culture. His detractors say that he sees persecution everywhere, that he is vigilant in "Keeping faith with the certainty of Jewish travail"; his less severe critics might cavil about his portrayal of Jewish mothers and his sexual obsession, but generally give him good marks, and his fans read every word he writes and heap honors upon him. This novel will engage and satisfy every camp.

"Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course, no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews." This is the opening paragraph of the book, which sets the stage and tone for all that follows. Fear is palpable throughout; fear of things both real and imagined. A central event of the novel is the relocation effort made through the Office of American Absorption, a government program whereby Jews would be placed, family by family, across the nation, thereby breaking up their neighborhoods--ghettos--and removing them from each other and from any kind of ethnic solidarity. The impact this edict has on Philip and all around him is horrific and life-changing. Throughout the novel, Roth interweaves historical names such as Walter Winchell, who tries to run against Lindbergh. The twist at the end is more than surprising--it is positively ingenious.

Roth has written a magnificent novel, arguably his best work in a long time. It is tempting to equate his scenario with current events, but resist, resist. Of course it is a cautionary tale, but, beyond that, it is a contribution to American letters by a man working at the top of his powers. --Valerie Ryan

Book Description

In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history.
In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.

For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America–and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.

Customer Reviews:

Lindbergh disappeared and everything went back to normal?.......2007-06-26

A pleasant read but disappointing ending. The book did open my mind to the fears that the Jewish minority would reasonably have (really, any minority) with a slight shift in electoral politics, but the ending was completely unreal. By the way, the Constitution provides for presidential elections only every 4 years so there is no way that FDR or anyone else would have been elected president in November 1942.

5 for insight and relevance...3 for execution...let's call it a 4.......2007-06-24

Philip Roth is certainly one of our best novelists--in fact, he may be among the last of our Great American Novelists, that crew of writers who were renown as much as public figures as writers. Norman Mailer has opted more for the public face aspect of his career than his writing career considering the quality of his work of late, and Thomas Pynchon has no public face at all. Modern masters like Cormac McCarthy (who, age-wise, is in the Mailer/Roth boat but has only become renown in his later years, which is a shame since he's been writing brilliant work from the outset) and Don DeLillo have set the tone for work that breaches the deepest levels of humanity and the issues of life and death, and though Don DeLillo is also a social critic, he seems to be looking at us as a cultural rather than a political body.

Philip Roth seems to know this, and so possibly took it upon himself to follow in the footsteps of Arthur Miller's The Crucible (Penguin Classics) to write a work that may be set in historical times (or pseudo-historical), but in many ways makes us question where we are at today. Philip Roth also continues to cross the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, as he most clearly did in The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography, working with a narrator named Philip Roth in a situation that clearly has not happened.

The premise here is that Roth revises the events leading up to World War II, or at least the American lead-up, in that FDR is actually voted out as the war brews and famed aviator Charles Lindbergh is voted in on a ticket of isolationism and keeping America at peace and free from harm. But Lindbergh's anti-Semitism is quite evident ( though mostly to the Jewish only at first), and the country begins a slow turn towards America First, the idea of bringing everyone in the country towards 'real American values,' which are clearly white and Christian. The story is told through the young Philip Roth, avid stamp collector and deeply engrained in his Jewish Newark neighborhood, and we fo9llow the hardships he and his family must go through as they become more and more aware that Lindbergh wants a country free from their kind.

Roth's fictional history is frighteningly detailed and thorough, showing a progressive removal of the human rights of undesirables through a steady stream of 'patriotic' acts. And maybe, it might sound familiar. Roth is out to show that the condemning of a people doesn't always come in one fell swoop but in increments, mirroring the systematic Nazi removal of undesirables after undesirables, but also possibly giving a warning about our own lackadaisical acceptance of the removal of people's rights in the name of peace, prosperity or patriotism.

Of course, Roth twists away from overt commentary by writing about a country that wants to avoid war rather than engage in a battle across the ocean, which may make direct correlation a little foggier, but in the end I don't think this is so much Philip Roth's own comment on the Iraq war as it is a study on how people are willing to excuse infringements of the rights of others in the name of comfort, whether that comfort be an acceptable facade of patriotism, or in the name of safety against an enemy who may or not be plotting against us. This is truly the stuff of the classic, activist American novelist, and Roth reminds us that there is still power in such a position.

But for as classic an effort this novel is, I think it also suffers a bit from being done by a classic American novelist. Philip Roth has a wonderful way of exploring situations, and he works hard in this book to make his imagined history very palpable and real and as accurate as possible. However, his parenthetical style made for tough reading at times. How wonderful it was to know how each and every movement and character connects to everything else in a web of causality, but his long explanations of the most minor events and lead-ups to entrances or actions got a little tiresome to follow. The 50 or so pages after the midpoint of the book dragged, and though the novel concludes brilliantly, and though Roth clearly has a greater agenda than to cater to my predilections, the prose reads at times a little like a history book, unquestioningly accurate on the names and places and verisimilitude, but a little tedious in execution.

Have no doubt--this book is of great import and should be required reading for all who want to think they know a thing or two about America. Don't feel off-put by the ramblings of a snob like me--Philip Roth is clearly a force to be reckoned with, who will shine as a strong light in literary history for a long time, so read him.

M. Rufo.......2007-06-10

Having not read any of Roth's prior work and knowing him by reputation (deserved or otherwise?)as a writer of somewhat smutty fiction that Americans seem to delight in, I picked up this book with trepidation. (Actually I picked it up for a dollar on the sale table at my local library.) I was pleasantly surprised!
Roth is a fine writer. He has created a story that pulls you in and draws you along. I kept wondering what would happen next - even though in most of the book very little happens in terms of "big history."
I should explain that Roth has written an alternate history based on the "what if" assumption that Charles Lindbergh was the Republican candidate for president in 1940 and defeated FDR's unprecedented bid for a third term. However, this novel is less an alternate history than an exploration of what Jews in America really experienced in that period. The only anti-semitic incident described in any detail has nothing to do with Roth's "what if" premise - it is how the main charecter's Jewish family is put out of a "restricted" hotel - an event which occured on a frequent enough basis even while FDR sat as our only president-for-life. What amazes me about Roth is his great restraint as a writer; interest in his story is maintained less by what he tells us than by what he does not tell us. This is difficult to explain. I can only urge you to read the book for yourself and then you will understand.
At this point I will touch upon how the book ends - so if you are planning to read it you might want to stop reading this review now.
There seems to be two broad theories of alternate history. One is what we might call the "butterfly theory." This is that if you delete even a single butterfly from the past, everything that follows will change and that the changes will multiply exponentially. I mention this because it is NOT the theory that Roth uses here. Roth employs what we may call the "detour theory." This is that things have to turn out a certain way, and even a major detour can only bring us back to where we must end up no matter what. Roth's imposition of the detour theory is a bit inartful. It is as if he reached a certain number of pages and decided "well, time to wrap it up!" His ending actually appears (for no discernible reason!) in the next to the last chapter. The final chapter is still quite good - but would be better if the reader did not know what happens next.
I should add that the best thing about Roth is that he does not inflict upon us another "boo-hoo for the Jews!" work of fiction. (The very worst of that genre, of course, poses as non-fiction.) Roth presents Jews as real people and in a context where none of them act as philo-semitic stereotypes. Although no anti-semites are portrayed in any depth in the novel, Roth clearly implies that much of what passes as anti-semitism is actually far more complex and is no more morally black than the Jews are morally white. For that reason alone, this book deserves an audience.

A Great Read: Entertaining, Good Characters, and a Great Story.......2007-06-03

I was very pleased to have the opportunity to buy and read this excellent novel by Philip Roth. He has had a long and career as a writer of American fiction and he has received many awards for his work. The book will not disappoint most readers.

This is a fast read that I was able to breeze through most of the near 400 pages in just a day. It is a page turner, a compelling read, and hard to put down. It will not put you to sleep. It probably falls short of being a masterpiece but that is secondary. It is a good historical novel set in New Jersey during World War II. Many of the characters are real. The basic plot seems very credible for most of the novel, especially the first half of the book. It won an award as "the outstanding historical fiction on an American theme for 2003 and 2004" from the Society of American Historians. Roth is an excellent writer, and the book has a Saul Bellow feel or texture, but the story is slightly more daring than what Bellow would write, and of course the protagonist is a young boy of just 8 to 10.

The story of the novel centers on a young boy who has the same name as the author, Philip Roth. The boy must be about the same age as well, born in 1933. The reader will assume that many of the small details are reflections of the author's own youth. The story follows the life of his family through the early war years in Newark, New Jersey. The main focus of the story is the rise of ant-Semitism in America during the war. The story is based on a hypothetical "what if" event: Roosevelt is not elected to a third term but rather Lindberg becomes President. His administration in the novel is isolationist and anti-Semite. The author uses anti-Jewish figures such as Henry Ford to create a plausible alternative tale of the war years. The author includes anti-Semitic quotations and speeches given by Lindberg that Lindberg omitted or edited out of his later collections of his works.

This is a great story and I would suggest that you skip any reviews that give away too much of the plot.

The plot for non American readers.......2007-06-01

I had not yet read alternative history, nor any of Roth's works prior to 'The Plot Against America". I enjoyed the essential theme of the book; the decay of even the most powerful democracy from insidious inochulations from positions in power, rendering ir quickly into martial law, oppression and possibly despotism. The book does this subtly, though many would disagree. It begins in the idolatry of "Lindy", of his supposed representation of American masculinity, this extended to his appeal to gentiles, then to indifference within the Roth family to the Jewish population, then erupting into national tragedies and events. I liked the pacing and narration style of the book for the first half, however I found that Philip was often interupted by an unconvincing narrator, with historical information and verbose reflections. Perhaps Roth oscillated between Phillip as a child and Philip reflecting on this period, it was a little destracting. The end was surprising and satisfying, though not brilliant. This book was enjoyable, though not your Fahrenheit 451 or 1984. Those who are critical of the idiosyncracies of alternative historical fiction will not enjoy this read. Also non American readers should learn the true historical context to follow the book.

Average customer rating:

Good book to talk about
True to my Word, Almost
When Good Writers Write Bad Books (They get awarded the Pulitzer Prize)
Astonishing
Book Club Winner

American Pastoral
Philip Roth
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Popular Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Book Clubs | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Nonfiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Underworld: A Novel
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
The Human Stain: A Novel
Beloved
The Plot Against America

ASIN: 0375701427
Release Date: 1998-02-03

Amazon.com

Philip Roth's 22nd book takes a life-long view of the American experience in this thoughtful investigation of the century's most divisive and explosive of decades, the '60s. Returning again to the voice of his literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, Roth is at the top of his form. His prose is carefully controlled yet always fresh and intellectually subtle as he reconstructs the halcyon days, circa World War II, of Seymour "the Swede" Levov, a high school sports hero and all-around Great Guy who wants nothing more than to live in tranquillity. But as the Swede grows older and America crazier, history sweeps his family inexorably into its grip: His own daughter, Merry, commits an unpardonable act of "protest" against the Vietnam war that ultimately severs the Swede from any hope of happiness, family, or spiritual coherence.

Book Description

As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.

For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longer-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.

Customer Reviews:

Good book to talk about.......2007-06-20

This book is about two hundred pages too long. On a certain level I understand why the book begins with the Nathanial Zuckerman, with the mystery of the Swede, with the high school reunion... I know that the novel is part of a trilogy. I understand that the opening echoes the WASPy Gatsby. And I am sure that a close study of the opening will reveal some statement on the structure of the American novel. But in the end, I do not believe that the opening--some 112 pages long--really adds to the central story. The opening of the novel creates a lens through which the narrative can be viewed. An attempt maybe to shift the reader's reading. The reader suddenly knows the narrator, the fictional writer of this story; knows something of his world, his concerns. The reader is suddenly not just reading the story as it is, but also reading the story as it might be read or understood within the world (middle class, educated, baby boomer, New Jersey, Jewish) of the fictional narrator. Interesting perhaps, but what of it? And to be perfectly honest, when the writer as character enters a work I am immediately turned off. I am just not as interested in writers as I am in "real" characters.

I appreciated the insights, appreciated what the characters did and said. The writing was quick and smart. But I kept thinking there had to be more to the novel, that the narrative would lead someplace other than the familiar old idea that those rich white folks ain't so perfect after all.

The narrative, in the end, did deliver--sort of. It created a world in which the extremism of groups like the Weather Underground is placed in contrast to the common order of America. But there is a moment, right in the middle of the book, where the mythology of common America is shown to be no less a fallacy than the mythology of terrorist/revolutionary ideologies. The protagonist realizes this. And it really is a brilliant moment. But that is as good as it gets, and there are over 200 pages yet to go. Everything from that point forward is simply a less dramatic and less engaging restatement of this central idea. Marriage is a myth. Family is a myth. WASP history is a myth. Politics is mythology. Religion is of course a myth. The heroes (if that is what we can call them) of the book emerge as those who release themselves from the yoke of American mythologies. But they're rightous jerks in doing so.

The idea that America is the sum total of its conflicting mythologies is graphically drawn out in the novel. And it never becomes an idea driven novel. In the end I prefer a simple, straightforward narrative. And that is the part of this book that I most enjoyed. All the other stuff -- Nathanial Zickerman (first 75 pages), the dinner party (last 80 pages)--I could have done without.

True to my Word, Almost.......2007-06-14

In my review of "The Plot Against America", which was not very favorable, I vowed to give Mr. Roth a second chance by reading his Pulitzer Prize winning novel next. Actually, I read "Everyman", then I read "American Pastoral". I can say that I actually liked both books more than I did "The Plot Against America".
I think, at its core, "American Pastoral" is a very interesting work on introspection and how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive others and the image of ourselves that we project. In the middle of the book, I was convinced it was a truely great American Novel, encompassing family values and morals, cultural and religous stereotypes and political vicissitudes. But, toward the end I felt it was a bit long and rambling and lost some of its strength. In my previous review I wrote that I would not purchase another Roth novel if I was not impressed with this novel. I have bought three Roth novels. That is, likely, the end of my contributions to his vacation home fund.

When Good Writers Write Bad Books (They get awarded the Pulitzer Prize).......2007-05-06

It's my impression that the Pulitzer Prize is generally awarded to superior writers for inferior books. Maybe the idea is to encourage newer writers who show promise and belatedly to acknowledge experienced writers in decline or maybe it's strictly a matter of politics, but I've yet to read a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book I thought was up to scratch.

John Updike's second novel, "Rabbit Run", was possibly his best, certainly his best Rabbit book, and deservedly won a National Book Award, but Updike was awarded the Pulitzer Prizes for his anemic "Rabbit is Rich" and his slightly better "Rabbit at Rest" instead. Other disappointments include the disjointed "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" by Michael Chabon and "Ironweed" by William Kennedy.

"American Pastoral" is probably not much worse than "Letting Go" and the "Facts", but it's certainly no match for any other of Roth's books from "Goodbye, Columbus" to "The Counterlife". The thing about it that disturbs me particularly is that if I didn't know his previous work or his biography I'd be willing to bet its author had no first-hand acquaintance with the sixties at all. The tone is completely off.

Astonishing.......2007-04-28

First and foremost about AMERICAN PASTORAL, Philip Roth can tell a compelling story. He strikes a firm, urgent rhythm in the narrative voice and information ordering that swoops the reader up and down the architecture of plot. He creates profoundly real characters who embody much of the American experience as well as universal Biblical themes. This is an incredible achievement. It makes for hugely satisfying reading.

Roth introduces his story through the eyes of his notoriously recurring protagonist, writer Nathan Zuckerman. The occasion of his 45th high school reunion in his old Newark, NJ neighborhood yields profound and touching observations about the human need for reunions, especially at an age when more and more classmates appear in the in memoriam pages. The trip home also reminds Zuckerman of his own local hero, a friend's older brother, the embodiment of the successful American student, football star, military hero and business man, the child of Jewish immigrants who out performs Waspish old blood at every turn, including looks-- the Swede. In a moment that cuts through the camaraderie of the reunion, Zuckerman learns that the Swede's life was not the iconic pastoral everyone thought. As he stares into the gauzy scene of swaying figures on the dance floor, a vision of what must have happened takes hold.

And thus begins the third person story of Swede's fall from grace. He is not a bad man, he has earned his way good naturedly and thoughtfully, taking his responsibility to others seriously. He is dealt, however, a child who inexplicably becomes caught up in the violence of the 1960's, whose act of protest destroys her family and shatters the personal and collective American dream. Roth gets it all right, history, family and cultural psychology, and the nature of perception and tragedy. Wow.

Book Club Winner.......2007-03-29

American Pastoral was one of the memorable books for our club. We actually began the discussion in the car on the way to our hostess' home, continued through wine and appetizers through dinner. We had some very divergent opinions on "Swede" and his reaction to the book's events. The book also prompted a good discussion on whether the individual can change, parenthood, the Vietnam war as compared to the war in Iraq, and the context of religion in our lives.

Average customer rating:

Are you kidding me??????
4.5 stars for The Human Stain
A Life Based on a Lie!
a contemptible pleasure
Identity check

The Human Stain: A Novel
Philip Roth
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Popular Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Book Clubs | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

American Pastoral
The Plot Against America
Underworld: A Novel
Sabbath's Theater
Portnoy's Complaint

ASIN: 0375726349
Release Date: 2001-05-08

Amazon.com

Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk--formerly "Silky Silk," undefeated welterweight pro boxer--strode in and shook the place awake. This faculty dean sacked the deadwood, made lots of hot new hires, including Yale-spawned literary-theory wunderkind Delphine Roux, and pissed off so many people for so many decades that now, in 1998, they've all turned on him. Silk's character assassination is partly owing to what the novel's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, calls "the Devil of the Little Place--the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies."

But shocking, intensely dramatized events precipitate Silk's crisis. He remarks of two students who never showed up for class, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. Then, at 71, Viagra catapults Silk into "the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication," and he ignites an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia Farley, 34. She's got a sharp sensibility, "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble," and a melancholy voluptuousness. "I'm back in the tornado," Silk exults. His campus persecutors burn him for it--and his main betrayer is Delphine Roux.

In a short space, it's tough to convey the gale-force quality of Silk's rants, or the odd effect of Zuckerman's narration, alternately retrospective and torrentially in the moment. The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey are just as important as his turbulent forced retirement, because it turns out that for his entire adult life, Silk has been covering up the fact that he is a black man. (If this seems implausible, consider that the famous New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard did the same thing.) Young Silk rejects both the racism that bars him from Woolworth's counter and the Negro solidarity of Howard University. "Neither the they of Woolworth's nor the we of Howard" is for Coleman Silk. "Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery--that was the punch to the labonz.... Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?"

Silk's contradictions power a great Philip Roth novel, but he's not the only character who packs a punch. Faunia, brutally abused by her Vietnam vet husband (a sketchy guy who seems to have wandered in from a lesser Russell Banks novel), scarred by the death of her kids, is one of Roth's best female characters ever. The self-serving Delphine Roux is intriguingly (and convincingly) nutty, and any number of minor characters pop in, mouth off, kick ass, and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo

Book Description

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

Customer Reviews:

Are you kidding me??????.......2007-06-22

How does a light skin black man "an oxymoron" if I ever heard one pass himself off as a Jewish man? First off, ask any black person who has family members of every shade, if any light skinned black person can pass as white. Impossible! Lets give Mr. Roth the benefit of the doubt, lets say that a light skinned black man can pass himself off as white. Why would he then become Jewish? European Jews came to America and dropped their so-called Jewish sounding names to become more Anglo. And here we have this light skinned black man, becoming a Jew, not an Anglo, which is more advantagous to him but a Jew!

Give me a break! Only a white novalist could come up with this dribble! What is Mr. Roth trying to say exactly? It is better for so-called light skinned blacks to be anything other than, say black?? And how exactly does one pass oneself off as a Jew? By changing one's name from Leroy Jones to Lenny White? This story proves what I have always believed about some, and I say it again "some" whites in this county, they have no concept of who or what African Americans, blacks or what ever name they what to call Africans. By the way, here is a list of mixed Africans, Derek Jeter (Yankees), Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, and so on, all have light skin. So, which one of them can pass and become white? Mariah Carey, and she would me more latina, than white.

The only blacks that passed back in the day are the ones that are white in appearance. Not! Light skinned blacks. Mr. Roth would have been better served if he wrote a book about a Jewish man passing as Anglo, a topic which I am sure he would have been well versed.

4.5 stars for The Human Stain.......2007-04-18

In this book Roth sets the story of an African- American college professor who has spent his adult life "passing: as white against the backdrop of the Clinton -Monica Lewinsky scandal. The character of Coleman Silk is shattered by an ironic and unfair accusation of racism at the school that forces him to end his career while preserving his secret. He begins an affair with a female janitor at the school who is divorced from an angry and unbalanced VietNam Vet from whom she had suffered abuse. Her tragic past collides with SIlk's tragic present resulting in the story's slow build toward a disasterous end. An American tragedy that has people victimized by circumstances beyond their control as well as by their own decisions , the Human Stain is a complex story that examines hypocrisy and racial, economic and social biases in American Society.

A Life Based on a Lie!.......2007-03-31

Dean Coleman Silk had kept a secret that he was actually light-skinned African American who passed for Jewish and maintained that identity for the rest of his life. According to Philip Roth's alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, Silk chose to live this way. While most of us would abhor such a decision, Roth helps us to understand how Silk who probably never fit in the African American world because he was too light but let people assume he was Jewish. I felt so bad for his family who he disowned. His poor mother who was never acknowledged to Iris. Who was Iris anyway? Maybe she would have accepted, she appeared to be more understanding that COleman gives her credit for. You just don't sympathize with Coleman because you don't understand how somebody could live a lie and how it effected his family's life as well as his children, wife, relatives and friends. You wonder if he told the truth, how much richer his life would have been. Maybe Iris and her family would accept their African American relatives.

a contemptible pleasure.......2007-02-20

Not only have I not been so moved by a book for a while, but I hadn't been moved by a book by Philip Roth in an even longer time. I had a brief fascination with Roth back in graduate school, and then all interest for him fell by the wayside.

Then, a student of mine, one with whom I could talk delightfully about DeLillo, Barthelme, even Beckett, told me that she had read _American Pastoral_, and that it had changed her life. When I went to get said book, I found out then (and only then) that this book was also written by Roth. I knew of the movie, and had thankfully not seen it yet, and decided to get to this one first.

Roth does have a tendency to get a little long-winded, with paragraphs that cover pages at a time, but I think that man has earned the privelege at this point. The scope and depth of character that he achieves, all in the name of the search for personality, is overwhelming. Coleman Silk is both sympathetic and repulsive, probably a staple of Roth since _Portnoy's Complaint_, as this classics professor is undone by a simple miscontruing of context--turns out, the missing students that he wonders aloud about the possibility of being 'spooks' are black, and this man who is steadfast in his ego and place in the world goes more than a little haywire and winds up befriending writer Nathan Zuckerman in order to have his tale told--but does Coleman want the REAL story, or just his own version of it?

Zuckerman, of course, delves into the depths of the relationships among people in this academically incestuous town. Coleman is demanding and secretive, but to extreme ends, which also makes him quite sad. Roth even explores with alarming pathos into the mind of Les, an abusive ex-husband who is a Vietnam vet. There is a constant fight here when it comes to happiness and identity--those who think, and those who experience, and Roth adeptly never comes down on one side or another.

There is, of course, something a little gratuitous about Roth's handling of Delphine Roux, a female literary critic and language professor who seems unable to please herself in any way, once she lets herself think about what she is doing, but the entire cast that Roth creates pales her out enough to make her presence not so scathing.

There were times that I struggled with this book, and got angry at its direction, but I would only offer that as testament to its brilliance--to develop intricate feelings and revulsions over a book is something to offer as a highlight.

Identity check.......2006-12-08

On one level, this is the story of an old-school classics professor, formerly the powerful dean of his New England college, who is driven to resign on charges of racism then further alienates members of the community through his subsequent actions. On another, most strikingly, it is a book about identity and the degree to which we may reinvent ourselves, not merely building on our backgrounds but even rewriting them. On yet another, it is a meditation on the American decline from the postwar years through the trauma of Vietnam to the moral relativity of the Clinton era. On all these levels, Roth succeeds magnificently. Perhaps he is over-fond of extended ruminations which almost become sermons, and I also wonder whether the campus politics setting would work for all audiences. But he has a wonderfully sly method of keeping the reader on his toes by interjecting important events and disclosures almost as asides, while revealing layer upon layer of his increasingly interesting characters.

Average customer rating:

Limits of Freedom
I devoured The Dying Animal in one sitting
Stellar novella
The First Novel I've Read by Roth
Time keeps on ticking

The Dying Animal
Philip Roth
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Popular Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Book Clubs | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Professor of Desire
Everyman
I Married a Communist
The Human Stain: A Novel
The Breast

ASIN: 037571412X
Release Date: 2002-07-09

Book Description

No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college–as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete’s critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.

The agency of Kepesh’s undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous and humblingly beautiful 24-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged–helplessly, bitterly, furiously–into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.

Customer Reviews:

Limits of Freedom.......2007-06-01

David Kepesh, the narrator of THE DYING ANIMAL, leaves his wife and young son for a life of "emancipated manhood." Then, for more than 30 years, Kepesh, a public intellectual, has complete freedom in his sex life, moving from woman to woman without commitment--albeit sometimes showing avuncular concern. Here's how alter-ego George O'Hearn and Kepesh advocate for this freedom.

George: "People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And love fractures you."

David: "He who forms a tie is lost. Attachment is my enemy."

In THE DYING ANIMAL, Roth explores what happens to Kepesh after he loses his detachment and, in an intensely physical but still distant fashion, becomes emotionally involved with a beautiful young woman. Eventually, he must choose between survival and detachment or the consequences of responsible love.

This is a fast-moving and fascinating novella.

I devoured The Dying Animal in one sitting.......2007-05-17

Kepesh's fascination and obsession with Consuela's breasts and his pathetic desire for her when she wasn't with him was astounding. How long can one really carry on with an obsession? Apparently, forever. And though he used her for her body, it was the cause of his torment and the standard by which she measured other sexual encounters, showing the strongest aphrodisiac may simply be being desired.

What I found most refreshing is that Roth isn't censored and some of the scenes and lines made me laugh out loud, which I felt was inappropriate at first but is one of the reasons I thoroughly enjoyed reading. He really has a knack for illuminating the inner workings of the human psyche--the things most people try to hide. Roth creates such perfect pieces of art!

Stellar novella.......2007-04-29

Now that Bellow has died, Roth is probably the greatest living American novelist, a position reinforced by his late period spurt that has produced such masterpieces as The Human Stain and American Pastoral. His capacious understanding of American culture, his super stylish wordsmanship and his deep perception of the male psyche raises him to another level. The Dying Animal serves as a sort of coda to his Americana trilogy. The protagonist, David Kepesh, randy libertine professor who abandoned his wife and kids in the 60s for a life of sexual and intellectual freedom has appeared earlier in Roth's work, but he returns here as a sixty something professor of culture who staves of encroching mortality by revitalising himself with sexual affairs with his young female students. He confesses that such affairs don't 'give you a last shot at youth'. Far from it, they actually reinforce the age gap between the 'Dying Animal' - taken from a Yeats poem, and the virility of youth, where time is measured backwards from where you started, rather than in terms of how long you have left.

Still, Roth is the laureate of libido, and knows more than anyone the value of a decent shag to rebuff the Thanatos slide, however fleetingly. Kepesh is a master at this, living an elegant, sophisticated single life in a book lined apartment. A lifestyle that drives his female students crazy. He encounters Consuela, a sultry Cuban girl who comes to realise the sexual power she holds over him by virtue of her stupendous breasts. When she allows Kepesh to lick her menstrual blood, he has been taken in completely. Kepesh tells the story of his affair with this girl, stitching it into context in terms of American sexual relationships as they have developed since the 1960s, with reference to the 'Gutter Girls' - memories of Kepesh's younger days.

The ending, which coincides with the Millennium celebrations, the fireworks around the world staging a mockery of the nuclear fear the world has felt since 1945, hits you like a leaden punch to the stomach. Age, youth, mortality, virility are not as simple and clean cut as surface perceptions suggest.

The First Novel I've Read by Roth.......2007-03-25

"The Dying Animal" is by Philip Roth, an author whose work I've never previously read. I heard about this book because it's being made into a movie (?) and I decided to read the book because it sounded interesting. I was nervous though, because Roth's novel "The Human Stain" was adapted into a movie that I hated. As soon as I pulled "The Dying Animal" off the shelf, the cover kind of grabbed me. How can it not, right? The novel's protagonist is a man named David Kepesh, a College professor and TV culture critic, with a thing for younger women. Back in the 1960s (during the sexual revolution), David left his wife and son and has been single ever since. He's made it a passion for getting together with his female college students (once they're not in his class anymore) and bedding them. Turns out that young college girls dig the 60 year old guys with white hair. Anyway, one student catches his eye in a massive way. This student is Consuela, a Cuban woman with large breasts, who becomes David's object of obsession. The novel takes place over an 8-year period, but begins at the end and features David narrating all the way back.
No novel I've read has captured sexual obsession so gracefully and un-pervertedly (if that's a word). Roth puts one of the strangest sex acts (I mean, something John Waters' wouldn't even touch) into the book and yet it never feels wrong or bad. The book (in Hardcover form) is 156 pages and is obviously written by a very intelligent man. It's got a great protagonist, but it's far from perfect. It drags a lot in spots and is a book one may feel compelled to put down and pick back up later. That doesn't mean "The Dying Animal" isn't worth reading though. The portrait it pains of the sexual obsession and, finally, the inevitable demise of Consuela is beautifully written and very realistic. I'm not entirely sure how a movie will be made of it (you'll understand too, once you see the structure of all this).

GRADE: B-

Time keeps on ticking.......2006-04-27

The metronome, the passage of time. The dying animal, in the form of a libertine professor, obsessed with sex, passionate about art. The book is a novella more than an novel -- focused, sometimes rambling -- oddly enough in the plot sequences, and sometimes gripping -- mostly in long expositions about free love or morality. There are some gems here, some thuddings. The plot is outrageously predictable and mundane but we forgive the old man when his language soars. The ending feels like Roth never quite new how to end it, but this is a problem originating in the beginning, he sets up an overwhelming obsession with C. but the it peters out, and we don't feel the main character is driven by it, thus to turn the story on this point, at the end, is lacking. I disagree with the reviewer who suggested this is required reading -- it's like Ford's short stories, momentary, sometimes solid, sparking in moments. A flame burns brighter and more consistently in other works by both authors.

Average customer rating:

Bellow against Nihlism
The modern consciousness
THE REAL DEAL
I cannot perpetuate this myth of greatness
a very strong (metaphysically and concretely speaking) ) well-rounded novel

Herzog (Penguin Classics)
Saul Bellow
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Humboldt's Gift (Penguin Classics)
Henderson the Rain King (Penguin Classics)
Seize the Day (Penguin Classics)
Ravelstein (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
Mr. Sammler's Planet (Penguin Classics)

ASIN: 0142437298
Release Date: 2003-02-25

Amazon.com

A novel complex, compelling, absurd and realistic, Herzog became a classic almost as soon as it was published in 1964. In it Saul Bellow tells the tale of Moses E. Herzog, a tragically confused intellectual who suffers from the breakup of his second marriage, the general failure of his life and the specter of growing up Jewish in the middle part of the 20th century. He responds to his personal crisis by sending out a series of letters to all kinds of people. The letters in total constitute a thoughtful examination of his own life and that which has occurred around him. What emerges is not always pretty, but serves as gritty foundation for this absorbing novel.

Book Description

In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption.

Introduction by Philip Roth

Download Description

This concise supplement to Saul Bellow's Herzog helps students understand the overall structure of the work, actions and motivations of the characters, and the social and cultural perspectives of the author.

Customer Reviews:

Bellow against Nihlism.......2007-04-25

What role does the intellect play in both an individual life and the wider culture? This is the exploration that lies at the heart of "Herzog," the deeply philosophical novel by Saul Bellow. Moses Herzog is a man under the spell of writing letters to anyone under the sun, dead or alive. This habit leads others to suspect his mental stability, though in fact he is "confident, cheerful, clairvoyant, and strong." This is not always obvious when reading his manic, incomplete letters, or observing his choices and behavior regarding his family and career. Yet, Herzog's untidy, frustrating life, full of yearning and error, supplies an apt metaphor for the novel's wider philosophical position: man must face his own life, his own ordinariness, and seek value. To do otherwise is nihilism, and to hope for a tidy, unified fulfillment is a dream.

While Moses Herzog in his world, and Saul Bellow and ours, are widely identified as exemplars of the intellectual, this novel is keenly aware of the limits of thought and erudition, and deeply suspicious of the learned. Above all, Herzog rejects the idea authentic experience resides in the life of the mind, or more specifically, in theory and abstraction. One can't think fulfillment. Values and relationships provide fulfillment. Yet our philosophical tradition has begun to reject value, and become elitist and nihilistic. Socrates began in saying that he only knew that he knew nothing, and we have gone no farther than the idea that life and value are nothing and philosophy is only a word game. Herzog is

"...tired of the modern form of historicism that sees in this civilization the defeat of the best hopes of Western religion and thought, what Heideggar calls the second Fall of Man into the quotidian or ordinary.... The question of these modern centuries,..-The strength of a man's virtue or spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life."

To be learned in not to be more moral or valuable, and there is a troubling malice behind the aesthetic revulsion towards modern society.

"Reaching at last the point of denying the humanity of the industrialized, "banalized" masses. It was easy for the wastelanders to be assimilated to totalitarianism. Here the responsibility of the of artists remains to be assessed. To have assumed, for instance, that the deterioration of language and its debasement was tantamount to dehumanization led straight to cultural fascism."

This naturally leads to the exhortation, "The world should love lovers; but not theoreticians. Never theoreticians. Show them the door. Ladies, throw out the bastards!

And what of the plot? The story lacks a neat, plotted drama, and its details are not what stick with me, but it has its moments. The central conflict is the relationship between Herzog and a younger, hipper love, and his separation from their daughter. It does devolve into tedium at times, but as I reflect on the novel, I rarely recall those moments. Too many modern novels involve the tawdry affairs of the cultural elite. Yet, "Herzog" is successful because it is juxtaposed with Herzog's thought. An argument in favor of the ordinary is well supported by conflicts that can't be regarded as romantic. The story should be ordinary.

Yet make no mistake, this is a novel of ideas. To underline every insight is to use much ink. The advantage of couching all of this thought into a novel is that, paradoxically, the aphorisms can stand on their own. They don't have to be absorbed in, or tailored to a broader philosophical scheme or thesis. Herzog writes to Schopenhaur, and I wonder if Bellow would share Nietzsche's appreciation of Schopenhaur's willingness to contradict himself, to affirm that all contradiction can not be ironed out of experience. Man is not a syllogism.

Just as our fall from grace provided us with a necessary distance to recognize and appreciate, though not comprehend, God, so does thought and art augment our experience, make us more aware of it, and allow us to frame it differently. However, Herzog gains no actual, practical guidance as to the living of his own life. Witness the mess that is Moses Herzog's life. "But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanation."

"Herzog" requires reflection and re-reading. There are moments of tedium, but it remains tremendous force in favor of humanity. "We have ground to hope that a Life is something more than such a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible, and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light." But there is light. This is life-affirming, melancholy, and inspiring. True art.

The modern consciousness.......2007-04-06

Herzog is a novel showing Bellow writing at his highest pitch: all that wide and deep intelligence, deep water thinking, the formidable awareness of American postwar society and its origins throughout history, the dynamic social and personal forces that clutter around a man's head, clouding his thinking.

I can't think of a single post war novel that features better characterisation than Herzog. Moses is a prime Bellovian character - formidably intellectual, though directing his intellect not at any specific practical means, but more a custodian of the soul, a deep moralist. He wants to know how a man should live his life in the modern world; does the individual consciousness have any significance any more?

Although one of the most intelligent men in America, Herzog is clueless when it comes to the practicalities of life. His second wife, Madeline, a strong willed woman has cuckolded him for his erstwhile friend, Valentine Gersbach, a man who swings his wooden leg 'like a gondolier', and taken custody of his daughter. Moses goes through the gears of mental instability during the few summer weeks over which the novel takes place. He writes impassioned letters, all unsent, to philosophers, presidents, successful academic colleagues, ultimately God, frenzidly trying to work out his personal plight, deeply probing deeply Tolstoy's maxim that kings are the slaves of history, the individual life is the highest form of consciousness.

Amidst a cast of superbly drawn characters - Will and Shura, his practical, wealthy, conventionally successful brothers, his manipulative ex wife, his sensual Latin lover Ramona, his shrink, his lawyer, Moses gradually works towards some sort of pact, an acceptance with modern reality, a way to let the wild forces of modernity run their course without struggling too much.

One caveat - Bellow writes in a strongly masculine tradition. He is not one of these kaleidoscopic voices that hones in on a wide range of view points. His locus is the highly academic, intelligent, male (and laced with Jewish) consciousness. Not so fashionable these days. This novel may not be for everyone.

THE REAL DEAL.......2007-01-02

There's big-time grade inflation on this forum and no one is guiltier of this practice than me. I feel that if the book is entertaining, fits together tightly, stretches my thinking, and has passages of beauty, well, give it five stars. As the author of two novels that were finally self-published, I figure: Why make success even harder for the author?

Within this context, I'd say that HERZOG is also a five-star book, except that it's much much better. This is because in each of these categories--entertainment, structure, insight, and beauty--HERZOG is truly superb. It's off the charts.

The narrative line of HERZOG is simple. Essentially, this presents the thoughts and experiences of Moses Herzog over a few days as he travels from New York to Martha's Vineyard, back to New York, then to Chicago and ultimately to the Berkshires.

But as Herzog travels (and writes his zany letters), Bellow provides a spectrum of many characters who are both fully realized and who offer some choice to Herzog, which is somehow a reflection of, or parallel to, his own problems. The amazing thing about this is that these choices always come out of character. No one in HERZOG is simply a thin veil worn by Bellow to preach or to fill out a point in the argument.

Can the universe be considered benevolent? Or is reality crazy, cruel, and mercenary? These are the questions that torment Herzog on his journey. Certainly, there are plenty of high-minded professorial letters, with Herzog heckling Nietzsche and so on. But many of these letters are simply educated fun and it's the people that Herzog knows who really carry and explore the argument. It's absolutely brilliant stuff.

At the same time, Bellow organizes many of these characters in "V". At one corner is Moses Herzog, a self-absorbed academic who, in his own mind, is benevolent albeit befuddled. At another is Madeline, his ex-wife, in whom craziness and selfishness mix in a single dark brew. Then, Bellow arranges his characters on this "V" so that differences gradually narrow and ultimately disappear in Herzog's brother Willie, who helps Herzog at his nadir.

Near the end of this novel, Herzog plays a game with his little daughter June: try to distinguish between the world's shortest tall man and its tallest short man, its hairiest bald man and its baldest hairy man. Ultimately, this is also what Bellow does with his characters, showing that benevolence and pragmatism can finally exist in a single decent and sane person.

The flawless structure of this novel, however, is only part of its brilliance. Here's my favorite bit of Bellow's prose. It's funny, probably a professorial reference to Whitman, and straight out of Herzog's character: "...what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home..."

READ THIS GREAT BOOK

I cannot perpetuate this myth of greatness.......2006-09-29

I cried. No, scratch that, I sobbed...from boredom.

a very strong (metaphysically and concretely speaking) ) well-rounded novel.......2006-05-21

This was more my speed. I have to say saul bellow writes in a manner that is appealing to me, because he aptly dives into philosophy and sociological issues without a frenzied style like some other heavyweights in literature. I noticed the lack of heavy fragmentation right off, yet there was enough to give the reader a sense of jumping in and out of moses' head and into the world around him. I particularly liked the book's attention to the many distractions that we face everyday. Moses represents the moral character of people trying to live by ideas, but he is continually distracted from doing so, because of the many different practical issues that spring up. For instance, moses has to decide what he is going to do with his house in the berkshires (so it won't become more of a money pit than it already has) and he continually has to make practical decisions regarding Madeleine. In academia one does tend to work a lot with ideas, but as humans we all must address many, many practical issues which tend to keep a person from completely retreating to the "ivory tower." Bellow does an excellent job of representing the stress of trying to reconcile ideas with practicality in a relatively straightforward prose. One of the main contradictions that we all must face, which bellow has handled very well, is sexual attraction and consciousness. It seems if moses had really done a check on whether Madeleine was a good fit for him, he would have immediately decided to move on. Instead, he seemed caught up in Madeleine's sexual attractiveness and its strong effect on nearly every man she met.

Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977, The Great American Novel, My Life as a Man, The Professor of Desire (Library of America)

Average customer rating:

Very highly recommended for both academic and community library American Literature collections.

Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977, The Great American Novel, My Life as a Man, The Professor of Desire (Library of America)
Philip Roth
Manufacturer: Library of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Writing | Reference | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Reference Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Saul Bellow: Novels 1956-1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog (Library of America)
Philip Roth: Novels 1967-1972: When She Was Good / Portnoy's Complaint / Our Gang / The Breast (Library of America)
Hart Crane Complete Poems and Selected Letters (Library of America)
Philip Roth: Novels and Stories 1959-1962: Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stories / Letting Go (Library of America)
John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947-1962: The Wayward Bus / Burning Bright / Sweet Thursday / The Winter of Our Discontent (Library of America)

ASIN: 1931082960
Release Date: 2006-10-19

Book Description

This third volume in The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works presents three markedly different novels that together trace a crucial period in the bold evolution of one of America's indispensable novelists. Surely the funniest novel ever written about baseball, The Great American Novel (1973) turns our national pastime into unfettered picaresque farce. The cast of improbable characters includes: Gil Gamesh, the pitcher who actually tried to kill the umpire; John Baal, the ex-con first baseman, "The Babe Ruth of the Big House," who never hit a home run sober; and the House Un-American Activities Committee. My Life as a Man (1974), Roth's most blistering novel, presents the treacherous world of Strindberg nearly a century later in the story of a fierce marital tragedy of obsession and blindness and desperate need. The Professor of Desire (1977)-the novel that prompted Milan Kundera to proclaim Roth "a great historian of modern eroticism"-follows an adventurous man of intelligence and feeling into and out of the tempting wilderness of erotic possibility.

Customer Reviews:

Very highly recommended for both academic and community library American Literature collections........2007-02-03

The third volume of The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works, Philip Roght Novels 1973-1977 contains "The Great American Novel" (1973), "My Life as a Man" (1974) and "The Professor of Desire" (1977) under one hardbound cover, with an inset ribbon bookmark. From the wry, farcical baseball humor in "The Great American Novel" that builds up to the intercession of the House Un-American Activities Committee, to the cruel marital tragedy and treachery of "My Life as a Man", to the intriguing story of a smart and adventurous man pushing the bounds of erotic possibility in "The Professor of Desire", each classic work explores a different facet of the subtext constantly running beneath the human condition. Very highly recommended for both academic and community library American Literature collections.

Goodbye, Columbus : And Five Short Stories (Vintage International)

Average customer rating:

"I sat down on my Brooks Brothers shirt and pronounced my own name out loud."
Relevant and moving
All the heart that Portnoy lacks...
Great debut, beginning of a great career
Goodbye, Columbus

Goodbye, Columbus : And Five Short Stories (Vintage International)
Philip Roth
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Anthologies | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Portnoy's Complaint
The Human Stain: A Novel
American Pastoral
The Ghost Writer
The Magic Barrel: Stories

ASIN: 0679748261
Release Date: 1994-01-13

Book Description

Roth's award-winning first book instantly established its author's reputation as a writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion for even the most self-deluding of his characters.

Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer break and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender and that illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora.

Customer Reviews:

"I sat down on my Brooks Brothers shirt and pronounced my own name out loud.".......2006-10-25

First Love is a really wonderful novella that was the first work of Philip Roth. It was published in 1959 and won the National Book Award.

What makes it so wonderful? The quality of the prose is exceptional. It is precise and often poetic without ever using that overly precious tone from which many short story authors suffer. Roth takes careful aim at upwardly mobile Jewish life-- most of the stories in the volume look at least subtly at the internal (identity) clash that arises as Jewish families start integrating into the mainstream middle class. What's nice is that he is unflinching and often critical without ever feeling as though he were being mean. Goodbye Columbus is beautiful and thought provoking, wry but not bitter.

The novella is published together with five short stories, "The Conversion of the Jews", "Defender of the Faith", "Epstein", "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings", and "Eli, the Fanatic". "The Conversion of the Jews" is generally considered the best of the lot, but personally I was more drawn to "Defender of the Faith". All five stories are worth reading, even if they are not as strong as the title novella.

Highly recommended.

Relevant and moving.......2006-07-12

Are you neurotic or psychotic? Do you worry and obsess over little things or see sombrero-wearing orca whales tangoing with sea anemones in their teeth? Then you should either read Goodbye, Columbus or seek professional help. Following Neil Klugman through a summer of indecision, sex, and straddling of social strata, the book is as relevant today as when it was published in 1959. Also, don't shirk reading the five short stories that follow it. They're great. And I know your mother and I didn't raise you to be a Lazy Jane.

To read more reviews check out Void Magazine's website.

All the heart that Portnoy lacks..........2005-08-15

I find Philip Roth's debut novella, Goodbye, Columbus, to be much more enjoyable than his more famous work, Portnoy's Complaint. For one thing, Columbus is much shorter - it gets to the point. It is not endlessly repetitive, the way Portnoy is - nor is Roth as full of himself in this more modest work.

Goodbye, Columbus has all the heart that Portnoy's Complaint lacks. It is the proverbial "coming of age" story of Neil Klugman. Neil is the Philip Roth stand-in - like Roth, he is a poor Jewish boy from Newark. He has his first great love affair with Brenda Patimkin - a rich girl from Short Hills. Brenda is all he could ever want in a woman, so everything should be perfect...right? The reader may guess at the stops along the way, but predictability isn't really the issue - it's the journey that matters.

I found the short stories in this collection less appealing. They are all on the same theme: the aversion Roth feels towards Jewish-American culture, while being a Jewish-American. This is one of the central themes in his novels as well, but his short stories are not able to support this theme as well as the other diversions that make his novels enjoyable. As such, the short stories are one-trick-ponies, and I found them tiring. Perhaps this is the reason that Roth is known as a novelist and not a short-story writer. However, the book is worth purchasing for the novella alone.

Great debut, beginning of a great career.......2005-04-17

This is Philip Roth's first acclaimed work, a novella about a Jewish twenty-something and the yearnings of young love, and five other short stories. Roth always touches on something completely exceptional by its normality, and tells a story in a gripping, intelligent and thoroughly honest manner. The title story is about a young man who out of youtful desire starts a passionate affair with a Jewish girl, knowing nothing about her or her family. He ingratiates himself into her life and family, while still remaining somewhat elusive and anonymous. He has no real family ties, with parents living thousands of miles away and an aunt in Newark whom he is trying to break away from. It is a fascinating story, providing yet another glimpse into Jewish identity and alienation, of which Roth is one of fiction's greatest exponents.

The remaining stories are also outstanding; remarkably different from the title story, but each providing something of the present day (well, 1950's when the book was written) struggles with identity experienced by the post-WWII American Jew, ranging from a 13 year old boy undergoing training for his bar mitzvah and questioning issues of faith and tempting fate; to a Jewish military sargeant conflicted about how to fairly treat Jewish members of his military battalion.

One can almost taste the honesty, it is so thick. That is what I love about Roth. He has no agenda other than the accurate descriptions of humanity, which in his experiences happen to be mostly Jewish, in all its failings, idiosyncrasies and conflict.

I eagerly await the next installment in my Roth-provided education.

Goodbye, Columbus.......2004-10-31

Goodbye, Columbus is a coming of age story, a summer romance between a poor boy and a wealthy girl. Many themes that were to show up in much more detail in his later works are presented in embryonic form in this novella, his first major work. Being Jewish in America, sex, class boundaries, the American Way: All Roth subjects, all handled with intelligence and compassion.

Neil is the typical poor Jewish boy enamoured with Brenda, the classy, self-assured, rich girl. He shows a rare spark of confidence when he calls her for a date after first meeting her at a swimming pool, when she accepts and they meet, he finds that he really doesn't know what to do from there. But, they bumble through the beginnings of a relationship, mutually attracted physically, diametrically opposed socially. Neil has a few 'poor' ideas and thoughts that Brenda cannot relate to, while she accepts such luxuries as a maid or 'getting her nose fixed' with such ease and complacency that we - and Neil - are amazed. Over the summer, their relationship develops further, with the typical ups and downs of love colouring the journey.

Neil is the 'I' character of the story, and it is through his point of view that we watch the story unfold. However, even though the story is in first person, there is never much of his personality revealed through contemplative thought or reflection. Instead, we learn who he is from the way he interacts with Brenda and others, and from the way he studies the events in which he is involved. By the end of the novella, we (mostly) understand his motives and ideas, and though, admittedly, it is a little difficult to imagine Neil existing outside the scope of the novel, that actually plays into the theme of the story. Neil is searching for meaning, for a reason to keep on existing, and he considers that in Brenda, he has found it. Whether this is true or not becomes a large focus in the novel, particularly when, later on, she repeatedly reveals to him that she is in fact her own person, with her own ideas, and that sometimes they won't mesh with his.

Brenda, on the other hand, remains a complete mystery to both the reader and Neil. Because we are never allowed to see her thoughts, and because her and Neil have such a different social background, she is someone who we try to understand, but inevitably fail. At times, Neil will say or do something and she will become upset, or tender, or both, and Neil will be so confused that he simply accepts. This can be frustrating for the reader, because Brenda is an appealing character, and it would be nice for him to have the gumption to search deeper within her for meaning and thought, but unfortunately he rarely does. Interestingly, this doesn't come off so much as a failing on Roth's part as an author, but Neil's as a character.

As stated above, the typical themes and ideas that Roth was to develop more fully in his later works are present here. There is the same easy insight into the mundane reality of life, and the same simple joy in, say, eating a piece of fruit or swimming in a pool. Goodbye, Columbus is a story that focuses on one single idea, that being the summer romance between two people that could not have a relationship in any other situation, and it explores it in a remarkably fulfilling way. Admittedly, the very Jewish quality of the writing and ideas may not be as identifiable for a non-Jewish person, but speaking as a man of no faith, I didn't find it to be all that much of a problem. Also, the casual racism towards African-Americans may be off-putting, but again, it didn't upset the flow of the novel.

To conclude, what Roth has done here is to introduce himself as an author, and for a twenty-six year old, it is an impressive introduction. Having read other works of his, I would recommend it as a good starting point. If you like Goodbye, Columbus - and I am quite certain everyone would - then you will love his later works. If not, not. And at only 140 pages, it is worth everyone's time to check out.

Average customer rating:

Passion, betrayal, and the blacklist
Roth Just Gets Better
A Great Historical Novel
Every action produces a loss
From the best writter alive

I Married a Communist
Philip Roth
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Popular Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Book Clubs | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Human Stain: A Novel
American Pastoral
Sabbath's Theater
Operation Shylock : A Confession (Vintage International)
Everyman

ASIN: 0375707212
Release Date: 1999-10-26

Amazon.com

Iron Rinn (né Ira Ringold) is a self-educated radio actor, married to a spoilt, rags-to-riches beauty, silent-film star Eve Frame (née Chave Fromkin). He is a Communist, and a "sucker for suffering," locked into the cycle of violence from which he has emerged. She has risen by assiduous imitation of what is "classy"--which seems to include a wide swathe of anti-Semitism--and ultimately denounces her husband as a Soviet spook. And who would be the narrator of this McCarthy-era meltdown? None other than Philip Roth's longtime alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who learns the full tragedy several decades later, owing to a chance encounter with Ira's brother: "I'm the only person living who knows Ira's story," 90-year-old Murray Ringold tells Nathan, "you're the only person still living who cares about it."

Characteristically, Nathan also discovers that his own story was bound up with the blacklistings and ruined careers of the immediate postwar period. It seems that he had been tainted by his association with the Ringolds--Murray was in fact his high-school teacher--and was denied the Fulbright scholarship he deserved. "They had you down for Ira's nephew," Murray tells Nathan. "The FBI didn't always get everything right." Roth's acerbic style and keen eye for emotional detail goes to the heart of this moment of high tragedy in which the American dream was damaged beyond repair. --Lisa Jardine

Amazon.com Audiobook Review

There was a time in America's not-so-distant past when a person could get genuinely punished for having unpopular beliefs, when pushing for workers' rights could get someone in serious trouble. Ron Silver gives voice to one of those people, retired schoolteacher Murray Ringold, one of the most colorful and passionate characters to emerge from Philip Roth's immense canon. Silver doesn't try to capture the cracks and wheezes of a 90-year-old man's voice (a good thing, considering this unabridged audiocassette's length); instead, he goes for the cadences, the pain from wounds incurred decades ago but recounted so vividly you'd think they happened yesterday. (Running time: 11 hours, eight cassettes) --Lou Schuler

Book Description

I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.

In his heyday as a star—and as a zealous, bullying supporter of "progressive" political causes—Ira marries Hollywood's beloved silent-film star, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon in her Manhattan townhouse is shortlived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies him as "an American taking his orders from Moscow."

In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira's turbulent personal life, Philip Roth—who Commonweal calls the "master chronicler of the American twentieth century—has written a brilliant fictional protrayal of that treacherous postwar epoch when the anti-Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.

Customer Reviews:

Passion, betrayal, and the blacklist.......2006-09-04

The life of Ira Ringold, a Communist activist-cum-radio star who was betrayed to the blacklist by his actress wife, is reflected upon by the last two people alive who knew him--his brother Murray, a former English teacher, and Nathan Zuckerman, who grew up idealizing him. The result is a complex and fascinating novel about the nature of human passion, betrayal, and much more.

Ira emerges as a tremendously angry and violent figure who latches on to Communism as a means of civilizing himself. Young Nathan is initially swept along by the purity of Ira's fervor, but ultimately gains perspective as he matures and broadens intellectually while Ira remains mired in a pure belief in Communist doctrine that blinds him to all its faults. Murray tries to act as the voice of reason to shield Ira from his own impusivity and rage. All of this goes on again the backdrop of the Hollywood blacklist and the vicious social mercanaries of the elite. Recommended.

Roth Just Gets Better.......2006-08-02

It's amazing that Roth continues to produce such first rate novels. This sad story about the seductions of communism in the 40's and 50's, and the hysterical reactions of the paranoid right, is an excellent introduction to the craziness of the HUAC manipulations of public fears (which has so many applications to todays political scene) while telling a story of how the age impacts the lives of one group caught up in it.
Yet the flaws of the characters are fully developed and so that there is no hint of mere propagandizing.

Roth is a national treasure.

A Great Historical Novel.......2005-12-20

I really liked this book. It is actually my first Philip Roth book. I was drawn to it because I find this period of American history, the 1930s-1950s, fascinating. I'm drawn to the idealism of people like the fictional hero of this book (Iron Rinn) and of real life activists who figure in the book (Paul Robeson). I find labor history during that time extremely interesting. I also find the betrayal and spying and generally insane political atmosphere of the Cold War period horrifying and yet something that we should never forget.

I admired Roth's portrait of Iron Rinn. Although he is an idealist, an obsessive, and an altogether annoying person who incessantly repeats himself and refuses to admit any shortcomings in his Communist ideology, it is easy to see why someone like him would be drawn to Communism. A working-class man with little education who has dealt with anti-Semitism his whole life, Iron Rinn is naturally in sympathy with the working classes and with black Americans. At that time, unfortunately, there seemed to be limited organized ways to aggressively address glaring social inequities.

And while I certainly find it upsetting that people like Ira failed to listen to the stories of what was actually happening in Stalinist Russia, his anger at a society that felt that persecuting "communists" was more pressing an issue than poverty, exploitation, or racism is certainly something the reader can identify with.

So basically this book is a skilled and moving portrait of a flawed, angry, and naive man-a deeply human man- who genuinely wants social justice; of the bitterness and pettiness and hysteria of red-baiting (which cost countless people their jobs and reputations), and one individual's too human frailties that are his downfall.

The story is narrated by a man twenty years Iron Rinn's junior who once worshipped him. The story unfolds as this now middle-aged man, Nathan, talks to Iron Rinn's brother Murray about the late Iron Rinn. Iron Rinn lost everything due to his connections to Communism, and in fact both Murray and Nathan were victims through their connections to him, even though neither was a communist (Nathan flirted with it for awhile but was a teenager).

I enjoyed this aspect of the story, Nathan's recalling of his hero-worship of Iron Rinn, because it's a universal emotion we can all identify with-when we are so young and first begin to pick intellectual and moral heroes in our lives and try to model ourselves after them. And then it is quite upsetting when, as in Nathan's case and in many like these, we find out that our heroes are flawed, and in some cases, we can become disillusioned.

Roth also does a great job lambasting the hypocrisy and the pathetic nature of those who persecuted men like Iron Rinn for political purposes. And at the center of the story, showing the banality that usually accompanies these types of political crucifixions, is the fact that Iron is betrayed by his own wife for purely personal reasons.

(I also really liked Roth's description of Nixon's funeral!)

I enjoyed this story on so many levels; the history lesson about American life and politics and the shrewd insight into family relationships. It is a great read.

Every action produces a loss.......2005-08-15

Near the end of Philip Roth's underrated wonderful novel "I Married a Communist", a character who is kind of unsatisfied with existence arguments that every action produces a loss. The right sentence, as we all know, is that every action produces a reaction -- but nearly the end of his life, Murray is certain that the so called reaction means losing something. However not Roth doesn't use the whole book to prove it, he certainly agrees with his character.

The narrative that goes back and forth in time depicts the life of Ira Ringold (Murray's brother), a very famous radio star who marries a very famous Hollywood's silent movies star named Eve Frame. It turns out that the "I" in the title of the book is Eve. But it is not out of the sheer patriotism that she declares her husband is a communist. Their story is told by Murray to Nathan Zuckerman, a sort of Roth's alter ego that has been in many of his books.

Alongside with "American Pastoral" and "The Human Stain", the novel is part of a trilogy written by Roth depicting life in North America in the XX Century. But different from the other two books, in "I Married A Communist", Zuckerman is much more active. This time round he used to be friend with the main character in the time when the events happened. Therefore, more than being only a listener or a narrator, the he is a character of Ira's story -- as told also by Murray.

When Zuckerman was a young boy, Murray used to be his English teacher and he met Ira who was already a famous radio star and married. In this sense, we can have two different points of views of Ira's rise and fall -- albeit both are biased and both men loved Ira a lot. The brother tells the inside story; while Zuckerman is able to tell how the world (specially his family) saw the radio star in different periods.

"I Married a Communist" has a plot better developed than "The Human Stain", albeit not as bombastic as "American Pastoral". But as most Roth's books, the narrative is first among equal, so is the use of language and the character development. The writer is able to inject life in every human being he proposes to create (even in the strange Portnoy, back in the past). Nothing is gratuitous in his books. Roth has a place as one of the best novel writers of the late XX Century. In his microcosms of Newark he is able to paint the world.

Sometimes tragic (Macbeth is quoted many times in the narrative) and often funny, "I Married a Communist" as a portrait of the past bridged to the present. Exploiting the witch hunting of the McCarthyism Roth reminds us that we are always looking for witches to be haunted -- no matter they are real or imaginary. And he reminds us that paranoia can be the first threaten to freedom of expression.

From the best writter alive.......2005-08-02

Not his best, but superb description of an era and inside of the characters

Average customer rating:

Memories, Mammaries, and Mom too.
A joy to read
A somewhat different take
Pushed That 60's Envelope Right Over The Edge
Not for the Easily Offended

Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Goodbye, Columbus : And Five Short Stories (Vintage International)
American Pastoral
The Human Stain: A Novel
Sabbath's Theater
The Plot Against America

ASIN: 0099399016

Amazon.com

Along with Saul Bellow's Herzog, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint defined Jewish American literature in the 1960s. Roth's masterpiece takes place on the couch of a psychoanalyst, an appropriate jumping-off place for an insanely comical novel about the Jewish American experience. Roth has written several great books--Goodbye, Columbus and When She Was Good among them, but it is perhaps Portnoy's Complaint for which he is best known.

Book Description

Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spievogel says: "Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration." (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.

Customer Reviews:

Memories, Mammaries, and Mom too........2007-03-23

The Arabian Nights of Alex Portnoy who knows his mother will castrate him as soon as he's no longer entertaining. It's not really jewishness that centers the novel, it's the voice of the storyteller, our hero, trapped by his memories, his memories of mammaries and Mom and their hold on his adult life. A smuttier version of "Annie Hall" and one of the funniest novels ever.

A joy to read.......2007-01-04

Phillip Roth's 1969 novel or perhaps it would be more accurate to say `tirade' actually holds up remarkably well after three decades. The novel is a prolonged rant to the narrator's analyst about growing up Jewish in New Jersey during the 1940's; it has all of the stereotypes one would expect; an overprotective/overbearing mother and father, alienation, humiliation, sexual frustration, the conflict between assimilation and modernity, and so on and so forth. The novel also has a nearly endless cascade of vulgar humor, often quite hilarious and smacking of reality. Roth has managed to concoct a brilliant pseudo-memoir; it's the literary Woody Allen dressed up with impressive verbiage and a razor-like ability to employ allusions. This is a slim work, but it is impossible not to devour. The jokes will leave you in tears and the narration is wonderfully composed. It is acerbic, real, and touching.

A somewhat different take.......2006-12-01

Alexander Portnoy, a brilliant 33 year old man (born the same year and raised in the same general area of the country as the author, by the way), recites his troubled, over-sexed past, in a rambling, stream-of-conscousness confession to his psychologist, the silent Dr. Spielvogel. Along the way, we learn about his over-bearing mother, his whipped constipatory, but well-meaning father, and his strange incompatable girlfriend Monkey, often accompanied by a detailed description of a peculiar form of masturbation or some other perverse act of a sexual nature. Alex, you see, mocks being Jewish, but prefers his religion to Christianity which he considers totally ridiculous. There's a sort of twist at the end of the book: Portnoy's real reason that he's seeing a psychologist is not apparent until it's revealed (pretty much every character in this book should be in extensive therapy).

I certainly was entertained by "Portnoy's Complaint" and could imagine why it caused such shock when it was written. However, in my humble opinion, it absolutely does not merit being considered one of the top 100 American novels of the 20th century, which it usually is. It's just not that great.

Also, I have to differ with all the reviewers who felt that this novel was humorous. In fact, in my opinion the book is far more sad and disturbing than funny. Sure, there are funny scenes, but Alex is a rather pathetic individual who hates, not only the women he's with, but himself as well. The character I found the most odious by far, however, was Alex's mother, Sophie. I kept wondering how anyone could grow up to become so overbearing and smothering. While she fed and clothed her children, and loved them in her own destructive way, her basic parenting method was to teach her children fear and guilt. Fear the Christians, fear getting injured, fear living your life. Feel guilty about almost anything that isn't proper in Sophie's mind. To me, Sophie was emotionally abusive, and I think Philip Roth would agree. Alex's forays into bizarre forms of