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THE FACTS

A NOVELIST'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Roth—the most relentlessly and trickily autobiographical of major American novelists—now offers "to demythologize myself and play it straight, to pair the facts as lived with the facts as presented." This book was written, he says, in the wake of a 1987 nervous breakdown—"to transform myself into myself, I began rendering experience untransformed"—and it consists of five smallish memoirs for his life up to around age 35. . .plus a fine (and necessary) zinger of an epilogue. The first, very brief section is a quasi-idyllic view of growing-up Jewish in lower-middle-class, 1940's New Jersey: aware of anti-Semitism, but thriving on baseball, adolescent camaraderie with other Jewish-American kids, and reliable parents. (There's also a touching portrait of Roth's relationship today with his old, frail father.) Next comes "Joe College"—in which Philip eagerly goes away to college, to Bucknell; he joins in the clownish doings of a Jewish fraternity, edits an irreverent campus journal, and acquires a steady girlfriend (furtive sex, pregnancy panics). Then, in the ironically titled "Girl of My Dreams," Roth chronicles his long, turbulent affair with—and eventual marriage to—non-Jewish Josie, divorced mother of two, "raving within and stolildly blond without." For Roth (newly published, a U. of Chicago instructor/grad-student), this was a chance to prove his de-ghetto-ization and his gutsiness—"by dint of taming the most fearson female that a boy of my background might be unfortunate enough to meet on the erotic battlefield." The result, however, was a nightmare of abortions, quarrels, "a running feud focused on my character flaws," and a wedding-by-trickery that Roth later dramatized in My Life as a Man. The fourth chapter, "All in the Family," focuses on the Jewish anti-Roth furor triggered by his story "Defender of the Faith"; the "angry Jewish resistance that I aroused," he says, "was the luckiest break I could have had. I was branded"—and compelled to keep writing about Jews. So the final memoir inevitably involves the creation of the notorious Portnoy's Complaint—which grew out of Roth's ugly breakup and court battle with Josie, his psychoanalysis, a five-year relationship with another (gentler) "shiksa," and the stormy mood of the 1960's. All five sequences are crisp, ironically humorous, engagingly thoughtful. Yet there's a feeling throughout that Roth is tending to skim the surface, to smooth the edges, of some very raw, complicated material. And Roth himself must have shared that feeling—because the epilogue is a blistering 35-page review of the book by. . .Nathan Zuckerman, that irrepressible alter ego. Zuckerman finds the memoirs too "kind, discreet, careful" to be truthful; he mocks the idyllic "romance of your childhood," distrusts the portrait of Josie ("Everything you are today you owe to an alcoholic shiksa"), and wonders why Roth's sexual compulsions get so little attention, it's a slightly precious gimmick—but a neat, corrosive windup to a semi-absorbing semi-autobiography that raises as many questions as it answers.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1988

ISBN: 0679749055

Page Count: 195

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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