426
MARK SHECKNER
Portnoy's Complaint
and perhaps, in all, his best book. Its prose is
strong and mean and finely attuned to the gestures of real speech, es–
pecially the asperities of a lousy marriage and the aggressive banalities
of the daily hustle. Roth listens to the language around him better
than any writer in America today, and when he is listening well his
prose is gratefully free from his characteristic mannerisms: those of
precocious insight and those of high purpose. From the beginning he
has had difficulty bringing his talent into working alignment with his
material, a difficulty that comes in part from the conflicting claims of
his two muses: Henry James and Henny Youngman. Books like
Let–
ting
Go and
When She Was Good,
novels of high seriousness, were
burdened by what now looks like an inauthentic sobriety of voice,
while the exercises in pure Youngman:
Our Gang
and
The Great
American Novel,
have tended
to
give in to their effects,
to
suffer from
comic overkill. Such stylistic meandering reflects the instability of
Roth's purposes. We see here a career based on splitting and isolation:
a periodic identification with one of these fathers and a fierce struggle
against contamination by the other.
My Life as Man's
flaws are charac–
teristic: the periodic flat spots in which the writer seems to have lost
interest, those hysterical dialogues that are a bit too frantic for a bit too
long, and the open seams that show us how, and sometimes how awk–
wardly, the novel was assembled. And yet here, in a rare show of in–
trapsychic cooperation, Roth's comedy has bent itself to the expression
of real pain, and his guilt and his irony have found common expres–
sion in the same medium. The resulting style sounds, as Peter Tar–
nopol observes, like a mixture of Dostoevsky and soap opera, but the
novel has always been the sentimental genre, and
My Life
is, at worst,
mainline domes tic pathos with only some of the sex roles reversed.
Roth has been successful here to the extent that the book's flaws feel
like inevitable aspects of its texture.
My Life
is a hard story to tell: it
should
double back on itself a bit, feature a false start or two, or protest
more than makes us comfortable-it should, for humility's sake, be
told a bit clumsily.
Yet·unlike
Our Gang
and
The Great American Novel,
whose awk–
wardness betrays the haste of their composition, the patchwork con–
struction of this book feels like the result of hard work with intractable
materials. My guess is that Roth has struggled long with this book and
that its successes have not been easily achieved. In fact, it shows signs
of having been in the works at least since 1967, which, computed in
