PARTISAN REVIEW
533
greater guarantee of existential realization than Joseph K's hopeless
bicycle licence? Portnoy's old man has this great
schlang
and a great
pair of balls and for this the reward is constipation? How can a man
stuff his
shikseh
secretary and not make top-banana in the world writ
large? And more:
if
Portnoy
believed
the world was absurd would he
think it at all extraordinary for a guy to get gunned down for tearing a
label off a piece of public property? At the end of the novel he's still
Hucking it, Jewish Version -like those other guys turned by novelistic
time into drags - Tommy Whilhelm of
Seize the
Day,
Herzog,
Levin
of
Malamud's
A New Life.
Mama Tar Baby has clearly won.
The moral? Sophie's naturally: it's O.K. for a fairy
goy
like Peter
Pan not to grow up, but a New Jersey Jewish college graduate of
thirty-three?
7
Any qualms one might have about
Portnoy
the novel don't at all
apply to Roth's writing. The book has it
all.
The fury in Alex's howl
contains no trace of the whining found in earlier Roth, or in those
Jewish poor Dogsbodys of Bellow and Malamud. Portnoy's shouting
colloquial voice carries everything with it. A terribly gifted writer is
working at the top of his bent.
. . . [HJere in a Turkish bath . . . we enter a dark quiet region
redolent of wintergreen. The sounds are of a tiny, unenthusiastic
audience applauding the death scene in some tragedy: it is the two
masseurs walloping and potching at the flesh of their victims. . . .
[TJhe place speaks to me of prehistoric times . . . when above the
oozing bog that was the earth ... swirling white gasses choked out
the sunlight . . . a time of amphibious creatures, plunging brainless
hulking things, with wet meaty flanks and steaming torsos....
The pitch of excitement and humor is everywhere. Exclamation
points, italics, uppercase shrieking, everything belongs, everything moves.
Two, four, ten levels of narrative going at once, each with its clarity,
it!. wholeness, all subject to the myth - whatever Portnoy discloses
has
to be
psychologically relevant. The transparent unhappily turns opaque
the moment Portnoy passes from anecdote to his Ancient Mariner fix,
but this,
stylistically,
adds dimension to the book.
Every break into the flow of detail- in order to explain to Spiel–
vogel, or ask his help - changes Portnoy's simple tale into a warped
(and woofed) irony: in a beautiful rewriting of the Duchess's "red
