A companion volume that enhances appreciation of the novel.
A spirited engagement with the 1969 breakthrough novel that brought Philip Roth both renown and notoriety.
It would be easy to form misleading impressions from this critical analysis of Portnoy’s Complaint. The fact that it’s an academic study from a celebrated university press might suggest that this book would drain all the fun from Portnoy. To the contrary, this critical work, written by a friend of the author, is very much in the spirit of the book to which it responds. Harvard Business Review contributing editor Avishai (The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last, 2008, etc.) ventures far and wide over literary, philosophical and other cultural touchstones, providing a context for Roth’s novel that encompasses James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Jackson Pollock and Judd Apatow. Avishai proves both an informed and engaging guide to the novel and its legacy. In a deft turn of critical praise, he writes of the novel’s expressing “the dirt of desire after the hygiene of childhood.” He explains how the novel is very much of its time yet transcends its time, and of how it has been perceived as quintessentially Jewish yet is ultimately emancipating in the way it resonates so far beyond the Jewish experience. Drawing on interviews with Roth and access to his notes, Avishai deals with the issue that has long been central to Roth: the blurring of fact and fiction, of novel and confession. Avishai builds a strong case that Portnoy is not Roth, and that the protagonist might even be the object of the author’s satire, along with psychoanalysis and pretty much everything else the novel addresses. “The joke was on everybody—parents, lovers, tribes, patients, psychoanalysts—which is another way of saying it was on the act of reading itself,” he writes, while elsewhere describing the progression of Portnoy “from a great farce into an unnerving mystery.”
A companion volume that enhances appreciation of the novel.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-15190-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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