On its original publication in 1982 this book was the first
full-length study of Philip Roth as a major twentieth-century
writer. As well as setting the novelist's work in the context of
Jewish-American writing (and Jewish-American families) and
twentieth-century American politics, the book explores the
characteristic paradoxes in Roth: self-disgust and
self-consciousness, restraint and letting go, nausea and appetite,
energy and frustration, stylishness and vulgarity, surrealism and
the mundane.
Roth is a highly literary and referential character and an
assessment is made of the conflicting influnces on his work of
Kafka, Checkov, Gogol, Henry James, Melville and Henry Youngman, a
Jewish nightclub and Vaudeville comic. In addition a close
examination of his anxious, revolting, garrulous heroes, their
mothers, their marriages, their shrinks, and their shiksas is
undertaken and a deep seriousness is discovered, co-existing with
Roth's comic brashness and bravura.
General
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