![]() Spievogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral. Roth, by giving us Alex, speaks to and through the nervous young person who lives on in us more resiliently speaks to that hyper-precious moment when the child goes into eclipse, the teen having long before been launched, and adult pleasures (bodies, risk, power) and their surprising allies (dissembling, aggression, moral equivocation) present themselves. after Alexander Portnoy (1933-) A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Salinger speaks to a teenager's rejection of phonies. ![]() ![]() Dickens lives on because he speaks to the bullied, ambitious child in us. Precisely because perceptions are idiosyncratic, the principle of tolerance must be absolute.Īnd that's the power of the novel today, too. Though Roth has spent more energy developing the character of Nathan Zuckerman, and in recent years has written exceptional novels starring none other than Philip Roth, it seems clear that 100 or 200 years from now, the author will be remembered as the. ![]() The novel's readers learned to think alright, but our conclusion, though we only dimly perceived it, was that we were inevitably enmeshed in heartbreaking relations and (if we are decent) self-criticism. Portnoy ‘s Complaint is the most notorious, talked-about novel in the American Jewish tradition it also happens to be one of the finest. We were supposed to be judged by "the content of our characters." The trailing insight of the book: good luck. I know I shall be pitied for saying this, but Portnoy's Complaint was the closest thing we had, back in 1969, to the culmination of forces unleashed by a decade of civil rights, a kind of awakening to liberalism's full and tragic implications. ![]()
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