PA RTISAN REVIEW
427
Roth time, is more than seven years ago. For not ' only did
Portnoy
begin to appear in 1967 but
When She was Good
was also published in
that year, a book that seems so ancient now that it might as well be a
Sumerian
~blet
covered with some, cuneiform scrawl.
My Life,
I
think, makes some sense of that anomalous book at last, for an ex–
amination of the two books together strongly argues that both are at–
tempts to manage and articulate the same situation, and that the first
book's failure
to
contain this life in its fictions led Roth to reformulate
his obsession in another, more direct, form. This choice has nothing to
do with the preferability of "fact" to "fiction" since that is a meaning–
less distinction for any novelist. A writer soon discovers that he cannot
rea11 y tell the truth, that is, be scrupulously faithful to actual events,
and that he also cannot really lie: he can only choose a style of
representation and trust it
to
be
suitable to his psychological needs and
capable of the right literary effects. While there is no measuring the
psychic gains of Roth's representation of personal catastrophe as "true
confession" in
My Life as a Man,
the literary gains are clearly substan–
tial, for the book engages his talent fully, at its most frantic, its most
ironic, and its most subtle.
