Philip Roth

[grechzoo]

Ill vouch for American Pastoral as well.

The first (and only) Roth novel I have read thus far, and I really enjoyed it. Stayed with me for a few days, which is as good a review I can give any book really.

[ariella]

I think it happens, maybe not a bra, perhaps her panties. And I think it's great. But then again, I like frank sexuality and erotica. I know how to laugh at sex. You found it hard like life, I found it light-hearted. I was laughing loudly every page. Life is hard, lurid and absurd too; Roth has an obligation to be true to life.



No, it was just a description the protagonist uses that the type of people I would purposely AVOID would make, I am V. openminded...and I really LIKE the book 'Lolita' - which I am reading at the minute, which is about a dirty 'paedophile', or you know, etc, and I can find that really interesting & entertainging and appreciate it. However I just found that ONE 'Portnoy's Complaint' Book juvenile. I also enjoy watching Law and order constantly, I imagine the Portnoy character in this book to be exactly like their idea of a 'perp' who everybody ****ing hates.
Also masturbating over your sister's underwear, who the hell does that? It isn't truth to life at all, it's just for the shock value, bleurghhhhhhh.
Maybe in 1969 this book WAS revolutionary and fresh, and all that - but nowadays we've already seen it all already.

[Heteronym]

Maybe in 1969 this book WAS revolutionary and fresh, and all that - but nowadays we've already seen it all already.

Yes, because someone had to kick the door open in the first place for everyone else.

I loved “The Great American Novel”, which ranks as one of the best baseball novels ever (if a bit derivative of "The Glory of Their Times", the best non-fictin baseball book). In addition, Roth has written dozens of accessible, very funny short stories. His letters to Einstein, written by a Jewish theatrical agent in an attempt to get aforementioned Albert to become more popular than “The Answer Man”, are pure genius.

The Great American Novel was the last novel I finished. It was hilarious. Reading it right after Our Gang, I figured that Roth decided to expand the idea of someone using baseball, the national pastime, as a way to to corrupt America. All in all, it's a funny exploration of celebrity culture, hero-worshipping and the need for myths in the time of national crisis. It's interesting how Roth manages to show why baseball means so much to the US citizens while at the same gently mocking the sport. Why do you think it's derivative?

And how can I get my hands in those letters to Einstein? That sounds just incredible!

[Ron Price]

Philip Milton Roth(1933-) is an American novelist who first gained fame with his 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus. The book was an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life and it earned him a National Book Award. I was only 15 at the time, in grade 10 in a small town in southern Ontario, had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and only read what I had to. I memorized everything on the curriculum and its several syllabi because that was the way, then, to get the highest possible marks at high school. I was an ace in my studies as well as in baseball, even a home-run king back in the pee-wee baseball league.

In 1969 Roth became a major celebrity with the publication of the controversial Portnoy's Complaint the humorous and sexually explicit psychoanalytical monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor," filled with "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language." By 1969 I had had my own experiences of lust as well as psychiatry due to my bipolar disorder. But I was no longer a bachelor, having got married in 1967. That same year I moved to Baffin Island to teach Inuit children.

Since those late 1950s Roth has become one of the most honoured authors of his generation. His books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral, which featured his best-known character, Nathan Zuckerman, the subject of many other of Roth's novels. His 2001 novel The Human Stain, another story of Nathan Zuckerman, was awarded the United Kingdom's W.H. Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year.

Roth’s fiction is set frequently in Newark New Jersey. It is known for an intensely autobiographical character, for a philosophical and formal blurring of the distinction between reality and fiction, for a "supple, ingenious style," and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity.(1)

Since those late fifties and late sixties, I have become a successful, but quite ordinarily ordinary, teacher and lecturer of my generation. I have received no honours for my writing although, in the last three decades, I have written and published several million words. My writing is also intensely autobiographical, but the main character in my writing is me and I do not blur the line between reality and fiction. I would like to think my writing is, like Roth’s, supple and ingenious in style and provocative in its explorations of life, mine and society’s. I would like to think that, but I must leave such judgements to readers.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Charles Simic, “The Nicest Boy in the World,” The New York Review of Books, 9 October 2008.

I’m intensely autobiographic, too,
Philip; but I go about it in a very
Different way that you. And fame
is not part of my story…..my life-
narrative…..We go after reality in
our own unique ways and I went
after it in writing much later in life
than you. I was just getting into my
profession in my twenties and you
were on your way to fame and glory.

Ron Price
12 November 2011