7/4/2023 0 Comments The portnoy's complaint![]() ![]() Roth's world is that of the nouveau riche and the pseudo-intellectual. It is just that sense of outrage which seems to me the novelty of Portnoy's Complaint. ![]() Bellow and Malamud cultivate stoicism, where their readers-incensed by the darkness of their work-look for outrage. Nothing but consciousness, so much consciousness that the Jew has been through it all so many times before. Meanwhile, Malamud has drifted back into Czarist Russia to find realities analogous to present predicaments. Bellow's Jews-optimistic characters like Augie March included-seem to have been wandering ever since the Diaspora began. When compared to the brooding and melancholic that seems so irrepressible in much of Bellow and Malamud, Roth's treatment of the American Jew has always been relentlessly comic-even if sometimes bitterly so. Not that it has ever been necessary for one to be Jewish in order to like Roth. PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT should do for novelist Philip Roth what Levy's advertisements did for Jewish rye. ![]()
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