PARTISAN REVIEW
525
does Portnoy "sit on life's toilet seat; he examines, lovingly, the bowl
beneath," added Miss Mannes, clearly either too nice a person or insuf–
ficiently liberated a woman to mention shit.
Her review tied Brendan Gill's (in the
New Yorker) ,
which said
Portnoy's Complaint
was "one of the dirtiest books ever published,"
described its hero as a "hooknosed, Brillo-haired Punchinello . . .
swaddled in polymorphous perversity," who pratfalls "into scatological
hyperbole" (it sounds great with a W. C. Fields accent). Gill faint–
praised Roth for his "coprophilous earthiness," quoted Pope, Whitman,
Wallace Stevens, Yeats, Patrick Kavanaugh, discussed Twain, Tennyson,
Mailer, Joyce, etc., trying valiantly, I think, to hide the fact that the
guy who was supposed to write the review blew town.
The New
York Times Book Review,
following its policy (as a friend of mine
has it) of even if-a-chihuahua-writes-a-book-find-another-chihuahua-to–
review-it, matched Roth with Josh Greenfield, who wrote a choke piece
which said, among other things, that though the novel was possibly a mas–
terpiece (by which he means, it seems,
Catcher in the Rye),
it "could
still be nothing more than a cul-de-sac." Greenfield found the book
entertaining and funny, but too much hung up on guilt: "it is only
by moving beyond guilt, to the problems and
turf
implicit in adult
independence and sovereignty, that any literature - or genre - can
hope to begin to approach maturity," Greenfield actually said, which,
I trust, is exactly what Sophie Ginsky herself would say on the same
subject, given a course or two at the New School, or a couple of hours
with Bettelheim.
Harper's,
following, perhaps, a policy of if-a-chihuahua–
writes-a-book-get-an-anti-chihuahua-to-review-it, popped up Kingsley
Amis who once wrote a funny book and has been funny on a large num–
ber of serious subjects ever since. Amis obliged wit ha fine set piece
(item eleven or twelve on
The New York Review
Chihuahua Lecture
Circuit) - you know the Waugh-in-Hollywood one that goes "isn't it
nice Americans and Jews and Roth write er ah books, fiction, prose,
that sort of thing?"
In
The New York Review
itself Alfred Kazin, while finding
Portnoy's Complaint
terribly funny, and Roth a gifted mimic, argued
that "it
is
Roth's case in the essential that he can write of Jews only as
hysterics," and put the book down as "the latest and most vivid example
of a tendency among American Jews to reduce their experience to
psychology." Kazin disapproved of Roth substituting his own "redoubt–
able intellectual will for the give-and-take of life" and "for the com–
plexity and moral depth of Jewish experience, which may look reducible
to a mother
l
a son
l
a shriek, a cry - but if it were/ would as a subject
