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MARK SHECHNER
away and keep returning in the form of compulsive and irrational be–
havior. In
Letting Go,
the mutual renunciation of Gabe Wallach and
Libby Herz (based on their mutual reading of
A Portrait of a Lady)
is
prelude to six hundred pages of indecision (his), neurasthenia (hers),
confusion, and sudden, irrational tantrums (theirs). In
When She Was
Good,
the praise accorded to Willard Nelson in the very opening sen–
tence tells us exactly what is wrong with him. "Not to be rich, not to be
famous, not to be mighty, not even
to
be happy, but to be civilized
-that was the dream of his life." A man who has given up that much
might prosper in a novel of manners, but when Jamesian pretensions
surface in a novel by Roth, things go haywire. When Roth hears the
word
civilization,
he reaches for his discontents. And in fact, Lucy Nel–
son, who has learned from Grandpa Willard the virtues of small-town
character armor, reaps its' rewards when faced with the demands of
pregnancy and abandonment. Her studied reaction-formations are re–
vealed
to
be useless and she goes berserk with terror and righteousness.
Portnoy's Complaint
advertises itself as Roth's psychic break–
through, the book in which the Yid grapples with repression and lays
claim to his Id. An oppressive childhood is dragged into the light;
a wild sexual fantasy life makes its debut seemingly undistorted by
style or euphemism; the Jewish mother in all her ambiguous
effulgence replaces the father at stage center; her son's masturbation is
magnificently confessed and celebrated; food is revealed to be an agent
of both repression and liberation, and eating turns out to have some–
thing to do with love and sex. The book ends with nothing less than
the primal scream, all ninety-six
a's
and four
h's
of it, after which
Dr.
Spielvogel delivers, and blows, the punch line. This book appears to
deliver all the right confessions demanded of an analysis: confessions
of undue bondage to the past, of secret humiliations and secret rages,
of crimes against the family, of failures of the body and overcompensa–
tions of the will.
Post
Portnoy
we have been treated
to
the breakthrough books and
stories: "On the Air"
(New American Review),
a savage and barely con–
trolled saga of one day in the life of Milton Lippmann, talent scout;
Our Gang,
the book of pure malice;
The Breast,
an experiment in
controlled regression with aD old-fashioned stoical message; " 'I
Always Wanted You to Admire My FastIng'; or "Looking at Kafka," a
lecture turned fantasy of Franz Kafka's possible adventures in Newark;
The Great American Novel,
a four-hundred-page free association
