Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die discussion

I have thus far read three of his books including Portnoy's Complaint, Fortress American, and Sabbath's Theater. I enjoyed the first one for its rite of passage to adulthood Jewish angst including the psychology of growing to manhood and for the sexcapades throughout. The second one I enjoyed as a Jewish American boy's perspective of World War II through the prism of an alternate version of American History in which a Nazi sympathetic Charles Lindbergh is elected President. The third book is possibly to be respected but I did not appreciate the severe decreptitude of the character in it.

I made a fascinating discovery in the 25th anniversary edition's afterword to Portnoy's Complaint which I just read. According to the author he, as a young man, went to a cafeteria to eat roast beef (he went there weekly, usually) and found a single spaced and typed paper of nineteen sentences not related to each other in sort of a Dadaesque, random stream of consciousness vein. He read this and realized at some point that this was to be his life's work and began each of his first nineteen books, up to Operation Shylock, with one of these sentences and checked each sentence off until he had done so for all nineteen around 1993. Furthermore, he states two of the sentences predicted his father's illness at age 86 and the initial incorrect first diagnosis of his father with Bell's palsy as sentences referred to this. Thus, the first sentence of Portnoy's complaint is, "She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness, that for the first year of school...", and so on for 19 of his works! I think this is amazing and he keeps the list in a safety deposit box for safe keeping. Wow!!!

I first became aware of Philip Roth through a short story of his I read in the summer of 1983. In subsequent years, I read about Roth via snippets of The New York Times about some of his novels and his marriage to the actress Claire Bloom.

But until about 5 years ago, I never felt compelled to buy a Philip Roth novel until I picked up The Dying Animal in a local independent bookstore. I read it and also saw the movie adaptation (starring Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley). The book was good.




I now have 2 other Philip Roth novels that I plan to read over the next couple of years ---

and


To be honest, I'm not sure I'm a fan of Philip Roth the author, but I do enjoy hearing radio interviews he has given, and am open to reading more from his oeuvre.

I had heard good things as well, and still want to read American Pastoral. But I read the Human Stain a few months ago, and while he is a good writer stylistically, I have to be honest, I really did not like that book.

Chel, I hate to break the spell, but the afterword was pure fable. It didn't happen. Roth is making a comment on postmodernism, the creation of literature and the like.

I found an essay that makes the points much better than I could ever make them. See here:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi...

I have only read three Roth books, American Pastoral, The War Against American and Portnoy's Complaint, but one theme that I know runs through a lot of his work is meta-fiction. His entire Zuckerman series (including American Pastoral) was about a writer, who had a childhood very similar to Roth's. A writer writing about a writer. It seems a bit lazy, but ends up being brilliant, especially American Pastoral which is really a story within a story.

Roth does some interesting things in fiction, including the afterword to Portnoy's complaint, but it was exactly that -- fiction.

Jonathan wrote: "Chel, I hate to break the spell, but the afterword was pure fable. It didn't happen. Roth is making a comment on postmodernism, the creation of literature and the like.

I found an essay that make..."

Well now, that is very interesting and potentially hilarious. I'll read your link soon and do a little research later. Thanks for the info!

Did you ever dig deeper, Chel?

This is a key portion of the essay:

"However unlikely it may be--and Roth stresses the sheer implausibility of his story by noting the historical impossibility of some aspects of his found document (like its references to a coronary catheterization and an EKG)--that fable could stand as a good summa of some of the main aesthetic principles of postmodern fiction. Some obvious features might be noted: the essay's metafictional gambit (an avowedly invented fable about the origins of a writer of fiction); the genealogy it traces to an implicitly more radical and less enduring historical avant-garde; and above all, the document's deeply antibureaucratic spirit and its appeal to chance as an escape from imprisoning routine."

There are few writers who play with metafiction more than Roth, and that's what he was doing, yet again, in the afterword.