422
MARK SHECKNER
Or, if not a professor exactly, then a visiting lecturer and Jewish
novelist like Peter Tarnopol of
My
Life as a Man.
Tarnopol, for those
who don't already know, is a thirty-four-year-old writer (author of the
celebrated novel,
A Jewish Father),
widower, neurotic, narcissist,
teacher, and patient who has squandered his talent and his manhood
in a marriage that has left him frantic, suspicious, over his head in
debt and guilt, and only just capable of turning the marriage into a
book. That book is presumably this one,
My
Life as a Man,
a novel in
three parts: two stories by Tarnopol, or "useful fictions" as he calls
them-"Salad Days," and "Courting Disaster (or Serious in the Fif–
ties)"-and an autobiographical novella, "My True Story," a true con- .
fession done up ingeniously in the manner of a "true confession."
That section is an expose of the mean and desperate married life of a
young writer. Due partly to the ironbound divorce laws of New York
State and partly
to
the inexhaustible loyalty, or was it sadism, of Mau–
reen Johnson Tarnopol, formerly Mezik, formerly Walker, the mar–
riage had been dissolvable only in accordance with the vows them–
selves: by death.
It
had been a trumped-up affair from the start:
founded upon a false pregnancy that was contrived with the aid of a
urine sample Maureen had bought from a pregnant black woman for
$2.25, and a phony abortion, for which a Jewish boyfriend paid
through the nose. Three years into the marriage, in the heat of a daily
brawl, this one over Peter's brief affair with his undergraduate student,
Karen Oakes, Maureen stages a mock suicide and threatens to expose
her lascivious professor-husband to the university-no, to the universe
-and he in turn fires off the last bullet in his emotional arsenal, a
tantrum. He tears off his clothes and dons Maureen 's underclothes.
Confronted by her husband in low and partial drag, Maureen confesses
her original sin and, as such things go in stalled marriages, turns her
confession into an instrument of coercion:
"If
you forgive me for the
urine, I'll forgive you for your mistress." This is the sort of
quid
pro
quo
we used to associate with the Americans in Vietnam. Now, 1967,
four years after Peter's desperate escape from marriage and a year after
Maureen 's death in a car crash that was possibly self-engineered, he is
finally writing the novel episode by bloody episode, in the monastic
isolation of the Quahsay writer's retreat in Vermont.
Like David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol is confounded by his predica–
ment on two grounds: he has no idea how he got into it, and is impo-
