Journal article
"Invariably the prelude to missing the point": Philip Roth, Mickey Sabbath, and Me
Philip Roth studies, Vol.15(1), pp.53-58
01/01/2019
DOI: 10.5703/philrothstud.15.1.0053
Abstract
[...]as I wrote my study, Roth kept writing, too. Roth had been including the word fuck in his novels since 1962's Letting Go, and the second excerpt of Portnoy's Complaint memorably began with an explicit description of masturbation ("Then came the years when half my waking life was spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet"), but the directness here, the seriousness with which the book's opening takes transgression, signals a different kind of book than Roth had been writing ("Whacking Off" 385). [...]while there are superficial similarities between Sabbath and earlier Roth alter egos (he was born during the Depression, pursues an artistic vocation, has an intense connection to his mother, thinks about sexual desire constantly), the way we follow Sabbath, from his affair with Drenka Balich, to his torpedoing of his marriage, to his return to the streets of New York, and then eventually to the Jersey shore of his childhood, I find dizzying, disorienting, more difficult to digest than Roth's other books. Discussing his writing process for the outrageous and often baffling The Great American Novel, Roth described his forays into absurd fantasy as flouting his internal critic and judge: "When the censor in me rose responsibly in his robes to say, 'Now look here, don't you think that's just a little too—' I would reply, from beneath the baseball cap I often wore when writing that book, 'Precisely why it stays!
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- "Invariably the prelude to missing the point": Philip Roth, Mickey Sabbath, and Me
- Creators
- David Gooblar
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Philip Roth studies, Vol.15(1), pp.53-58
- Publisher
- Purdue University Press
- DOI
- 10.5703/philrothstud.15.1.0053
- ISSN
- 1547-3929
- eISSN
- 1940-5278
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/01/2019
- Academic Unit
- Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies; English
- Record Identifier
- 9984269240802771
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