(3 of 5)
The trilogy is Roth's most complex and structurally satisfying work. It is a disciplined string ensemble compared with Portnoy's Complaint, which had the primal power of a high school band. Yet Zuckerman and Portnoy have close ties. Both star in comedies of the unconscious, burlesques of psychoanalytic processes whose irreverence and shocking explicitness challenge the pieties that protect hidden feelings. "Ill tell you your calling," screams Zuckerman at Critic Appel, "President of the Rabbinical Society for the Suppression of Laughter in the Interest of Loftier Values! Minister of the Official Style for Jewish Books Other than the Manual for Circumcision."
Roth has expressed similar sentiments, more suitably phrased for literary debate, in Reading Myself and Others (1975). In this collection of essays and interviews he answered his critics, among them Irving Howe. In the pages of Commentary, the monthly magazine of the American Jewish Committee, Howe rendered the solemn judgment that Portnoy's Complaint degraded American Jews. Roth saw the roots of such attacks in history. Wrote the embattled author: "He [the Jew] is not expected to make a spectacle of himself, either by shooting off his mouth or shooting off his semen, and certainly not by shooting off his mouth about shooting off his semen."
One of the ironies of Roth's career is that his style is so immediate, his sense of phrasing so vital, that readers cannot be blamed for blurring the distinction between the writer and his creation. Even Claire Bloom, with whom Roth shares a "paperless marriage," sometimes slips and says "you" when referring to Zuckerman. Bloom, 52, and the novelist, 50, have been together seven years. Roth's only marriage ended when his wife, Margaret Martinson, was killed in a 1968 car accident. The couple had been separated for five years; they had no children.
Both Roth and Bloom spend much of their time in the writer's 1790 colonial farmhouse on 40 orderly acres in northwest Connecticut. There are frequent stays in London, where Bloom continues to act on stage and before the camera. In January she will appear in Roth's adaptation of The Ghost Writer on Public Broadcasting.
"Life is being alone in a room," says Roth, who does most of his writing in a two-room cottage several hundred yards from the main house. "At this stage of the game I know it. I know there is no way out. You choose your prison, and I've tried to put mine in paradise." The room is neat and sparsely furnished. A worn book about Newark is at hand for reference, and a haunted Franz Kafka gazes from a prominently displayed photograph to remind the writer of paradise's alternative.
Roth has never had an easy time behind his typewriter. He is a demanding craftsman who has chosen difficult material. "Intimacy and subjectivity are my subjects," he explains, though that is as far as he goes toward defining the boundary between himself and Nathan Zuckerman. Their Newarks are the same; both lived in the Weequahic section, which Roth describes as once having been a Jewish village of hard-working plumbers, salesmen and shopkeepers.