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didn 't really delve deeply into anguish , Michaels's prime subject , until
The
Dead Father.
Before Michaels was linked to such writers with the appear–
ance of this book , he obviously had to conceive ofand even compose many of
its chapters , since they 've been appearing in print since 1970.
He 's also being lumped , in several ways, with Philip Roth, who
certainly saw "City Boy," the only piece of Michaels's writing I can
conceivably compare to Roth (how can it be compared to
Goodbye, Columbus,
Letting Go,
or
When She Was Good,
for example?) before he completed
Portnoy's Complaint,
being the avid reader he witnesses himself as in
Reading
Myself A nd Others
(Farrar , Straus
&
Giroux, 1975) . "Whacking Off," the
first portion of
Portnoy's Complaint,
appeared in Issue
#
3, Summer , 1967 ,
of this review; "City Boy" in the Feb. 15, 1967 issue of
Paris Review.
Roth is
also forty-five.
Portnoy's Complaint
was put between covers as a novel in
1969, the same year that
Going Places,
pieces of which appeared from 1964
to
1969, was published, and , in 1964, Roth, serving as judge for the
Massachusetts Review,
selected "Sticks and Stones" for that publication's
annual Quill Award. To ferret out who was whose influence or Godfather
would be to belabor a point.
In his use of Trotsky, Byron, Dostoyevsky , Freud , Hegel , Kafka,
Marx, Wordsworth , and other literary and cultural and philosophical
figures from the past, usually not as mere entities from the past, but often as
integrated characters and full-bodied spokesmen in his book, Michaels
seems to be saying that our lives and histories pursue us, or that we are
."chasing constructions," as Kafka wrote in one of his letters; and that men
who attain prominence , whether during their lifetimes or through the
hindsight of beatifying history, have been caught up in " the word ." This is
the same word that proceeded down to us out of the darkness and became
light, and Michaels illuminates just how much, other than in the Scrip–
tures, this history tends to gloss over, or simply lie.
Whether the above mentioned figures were savage, Christlike,
malingering, conciliatory, emotional, cold, or whatever, they have always
drawn to themselves forces equally opposed or apposite, or so Michaels
seems to be saying, and these forces, seen from different perspectives, can
make the man inside the figure seem entirely other than what he was, or
is . Or, on the other hand, can help define his character with a more
obvious congruity. The confined parameters of intellectuality have never
been able to bring alive and deck out in flesh such a prescient point . Nor,
perhaps, have Michaels's intellectual mentors been given such a healthy
rap on their knuckles, which might be why so many of them have had
their ire inflamed to near incoherence by this book, both in private
conversation and in print - e.g. , Irving Howe in his negative review in
