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JACK LUDWIG
looking glass and finds a fantastic world on the other side. Roth's
American Scream rages against a mirror one crashes through only
to
meet the same old stuff beyond it, the hideous physical and psychological
reality from which there seems to be no escape. In
Lolita
the ordinary
turns magical and wild; "in
Portnoy
the small boy's magical world of
peaches floating in jello ends in a boring plodding routine reality only
Roth's magnificent stylistic bust out can overcome.
The novel opens quietly, echoing Proust: the lyric wonder of that
delightful small boy contemplating his mother's ubiquity and mystery.
This gentle opening becomes a metaphor for the pastoral quiet and cut–
out the adult Portnoy wants again. The steam bath (where there are
neither women nor
goyim)
has it, and center field has it even more - a
great wide Huck Finn river of a field where a guy can claim fly balls
easily and gracefully merely by calling "It's mine." Whacking off has
it, and pussy-eating when the girl doesn't follow on with talk of mar–
riage. Most of all, the session with Doctor Spielvogel has it, one long
stretch of experience "all mine."
The rest is din and shouting, screams, shrieks, pounding on bath–
room doors, threats, accusations, blame and counterblame. That ubiquit–
ous lady so magic with jello turns in a twinkling from good fairy to
bad. What is she doing to "the little overearnest innocent endlessly
in
search of the key to that unfathomable mystery, his mother's approba–
tion"? Sitting over her with a knife to make
him
eat, isn't
that
the
moral equivalent of war? Or somebody pounding the locked bathroom
door while Alex heroically tries to do his thing?
Pow! Pow! There's for Sophie! Pow Pow! Again! Two feet and
two fists stuck in Tar Baby - that's the structure of the novel,
with
Portnoy the
shnook
poised for one last suicidal butt. Tar Baby, "Jewish
Mother," it's all one. Simpleminded causalities need simpleminded
causes. Do sweet-faced little Christian boys whose mothers speak softly
and carry watercress sandwiches, do such male children pull their dongs
lickety-split
efsher?
Should the protean cock itself maybe get a little
credit in the masturbation Olympics? Perhaps it, as
Lear's
Edmund
might have suggested, would provide incentives no matter what stars
presided in heaven when Alexander Portnoy was born, no matter what
the Jews were up to, or Sophie Ginsky. Narcissus' mother, as far as we
know, wasn't Jewish. Nor, for that matter, was Jocasta.
What is Spielvogel to do about simplemindedness? Screaming about
absurdity, Portnoy doesn't believe in it. Like Josef K he adds up only
objective facts. But why, in an absurd world, should a high
I.Q.,
a
college degree, good looks, style, wit and an important job be any
