Philip Roth
READING MYSELF
To begin, how extreme a departure from your /Jrevious fie–
fiction is
The Great American Novel?
If
The Great American Novel
is
an extreme departure, it's be–
cause the tendency to comedy that's been present even in my most
somber books and stories, has been allowed to take complete charge
of my imagination and lead it where it may. I don't think I was any
less farcical, blatant, and coarse-grained in
Our Gang,
but that book,
aimed at a precise target, had a punitive purpose that inevitably
restricted the range of humorous possibilities. And in
Portnoy's Com–
plaint,
though the comedy may have been what was most obvious
about the novel, strains of pathos, nostalgia, and (as I see it) evoca–
tive lyricism, worked to qualify the humor and to place the mono–
logue in a reasonably familiar setting, literary and psychological;
comedy was the means by which the character synthesized and arti–
culated his sense of himself and his predicament.
In
The Great American Novel
the satiric bull's-eye has been
replaced by a good-sized imaginary world more loosely connected to
the actual than in
OUT Gang.
And except for the "Prologue" and
"Epilogue," the comedy is not turned on and off, or on and on, by a
self-conscious narrator using humor to shape your (and his) idea of
himself, as in
Portnoy's Complaint.
Widening the focus, and by and
large removing the comedian himself from the stage, has resulted in
a less constrained kind of comic invention. The comedy here is not
softened or mitigated by the familiar human presence it flows through
and defines, nor does the book try to justify whatever is reckless about
it by claiming some redeeming social or political value. It follows its
