PARTISAN REVIEW
413
Roth rewrites the opening sentence of
The Metamorphosis
this
way: "As Franz Kafka awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he
found himself transformed in his bed into a father, a writer, and a
Jew." This Kafka is no gigantic insect with three pairs of legs quiver–
ing helplessly before his eyes but a man with three afflictions: Jewish–
ness, talent, and fatherhood, the last, the greatest affliction of all. Imag–
ine a Kafka, or a Roth, trying to love that brilliant issue of his loins
known as a son. "Keep him away from me," screams a young, imagi–
nary Roth in the Kafka piece. Jake Portnoy's bowels answer in frozen
rage from the pages of an earlier book. Paternity is a legal fiction in
Roth's books where sons and fathers turn out to
be
brothers under the
skin, locked into generations by an unfortunate biological fate. What
is Isaac to do when Abraham drops the knife and gets down on the
chopping block with him? That is Roth 's real dilemma. And that is
why manhood in his books never gets farther than a dream of center
field. The son's chief concern is not to escape his father's wrath but to
short-circuit his sentimentality; the thjng he doesn't want to do is make
his father cry.
With fatherhood in doubt, all other relationships are in trouble.
Relationships, in Roth's world, are painful experiments whose fail–
ures may be preferable to their shame-ridden successes. Men and
women are natural enemies who do horrible things when they mis–
takenly get together, for marrying is surely as barred to Roth's sons as
ever it was to Kafka 's.
It
is a good thing for Aunt Rhoda ("Looking at
Kafka" ) that Dr. Kafka's problem is revealed
to
her
before
the marriage
at that Atlantic City Hotel, for marriage is a fate worse than lifelong
loneliness. Love is a front for aggression; sex is an occasion for failure;
childhood is tragedy; adulthood farce. The family, according to Roth,
doesn 't pass on culture; it transmits symptoms.
In
such a world, to be a
child is excruciating; to be a parent is unimaginable.
If
Roth's books read like case histories, so does the profile of his
entire career.
It
begins with an orderly and sedate fiction about
straight-laced heroes who fail at some 'relationship or vital task and
manifest their disappointment in "symptoms," spontaneous out–
breaks of anger, unreason, or vertigo. Mrs. Portnoy calls them "con–
niption fits. " The early books, the
Goodbye Columbus
stories,
Letting
Go,
and
When She Was Good,
with their repressed and driven charac–
ters, constitute a fiction of failed renunciation. Their heroes are all
characters who repress desires which, as we might expect, refuse to go
