I read Roth from time to time, but I have to admit that the endless misogynistic bashings masquerading as boyish sexual hijinks really just gets under my skin after a bit. The same goes for Saul Bellow, who, overall, I rate as a much more humane and all-around better writer than Roth, but who still suffered from that same old ‘Jewish-literary-male complex that requires he make the entire female gender appear to be sluts/nags/morons in virtually every novel that drops from his pen’ complex that appears to be a malady of almost all male Chosen Ones who depend upon the literary muse for their livings. WTF is up with that, anyway?

“The entire book could have been written in one sentence: “Doctor, I, Alexander Portnoy, consider women to be an alien species and to be intellectually and morally inferior to me, but I want to fuck them and I expect them to rescue me from my extreme narcissism and self-loathing, so I sexually abuse them and then make them responsible for my lack of emotional maturity.””

I’ve been waiting a lot of years for someone to write that.

It’s posted here:

http://www.badgerinternet.com/~bobkat/observer1.html

In his examination of the “conflict” of the aging protagonist, who is transparently based on Old Johnny himself, Wallace concludes;

“Erect
or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the book’s
first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he’s so
unhappy is that he’s an asshole.”

Aaaaand, she’s a she. So ha, pipe smoking wankers! Avada Kedavra!