Mark Shechner
PHILIP ROTH
I knew something about Philip Roth before 1967. Since I
had once lived in Newark I had read
Goodbye Columbus
and, the Jersey
J ewish world being a small one, had an aunt who claimed to know the
real Brenda Patimkin but wasn't about to tell. And I knew from the
reviews that Roth had published two novels subsequent to the
Co–
lumbus
stories and that they were indifferently received. I knew that
they were long and not about Newark and I did not read them. I first
looked into "Whacking Off," a
Partisan Review
piece which some of
my graduate student co lleagues were passing about, just as some twen–
ty years before their grammar school counterparts had passed around
The Amboy Dukes.
That was unique, for in our time and in that place,
Berkeley, 1967, communities of knowledge did not as a rule form
around fiction: we communed, when we had to, over
Zap Comics,
zap
politics, literary criticism, or Country Joe and the Fish.
Our motives in recommending Roth to each other were clear
enough: spontaneous fraternities that form around tex ts are essentially
confessional communities.
If
none of us bore all of Portnoy's anxieties
or identified with each fea r and every confidence, we all unders tood in
our own lives some portion of his complaint. Each of us had his oral or
anal or phallic secret that itched to be revealed. As outwardly sedate
and upwardly-mobile graduate students, we longed to be known to
each other, behind our backs, as private sinners. And the serial publi–
cation of
Portnoy,
as it rolled on through "The Jewish Blues" and
