Philip Roth, the top-tier Jewish-American novelist and native of New Jersey, greatest state in the union, has been in the news lately, so I figured it was a propitious time to read another of his works.  (During the campaign of terror that has been this blog's life, I have reread Roth's famous Portnoy's Complaint and read "Goodbye, Columbus.")  Last week I settled on 1972's The Breast because it was short (like 75 pages of text) and seemed like it might be crazy.  I read a scan of a first edition hardcover (cover price $4.95) I found at the internet archive.

Our narrator, David Alan Kepesh, is a 38-year-old  hypochondriac and professor of literature whose parents ran a hotel in the Catskills when he was a kid; he has a failed marriage behind him, but is in the third or fourth year of a relatively stable and satisfying relationship with a twenty-something woman, Claire Ovington.  He relates to us an amazing, astounding, fantastic phenomenon which began with a radical increase in the sensitivity of his penis and a corresponding renaissance of his physical desire for Claire and ability to enjoy sexual intercourse.  After a few weeks of this surprising and welcome change in his sex life, he noticed a discoloration around his penis.  Kepesh scheduled a visit to his doctor, but before his appointment came he underwent an unbelievable, and monstrously painful, transformation.  He woke up in a hospital, blind, with no arms or legs, shrieking and sobbing in horror and misery for days, thinking he had been in a boiler explosion--in fact, due to a bizarre hormonal event, he had been transformed into a six-foot-long bag of flesh, his radically altered penis at one end--he is a huge womanly breast.

Roth doesn't present this scenario as an absurd farce, but rather like a serious science fiction horror story, describing the biological realities of this transformation (e. g., how he can still hear and talk and breathe without a proper mouth, nose or ears), the efforts of the medical community to keep him alive (Kepesh is fed intravenously, and tubes carry away his wastes) and, most importantly, Kepesh's psychological responses to this phenomenon as well as the reactions of his parents, colleagues, and Claire, his loyal girlfriend.  Roth succeeds in making all this pretty disturbing.

I think it is fair to say that, once the initial background has been laid out, the novella chronicles three distinct periods in Kepesh's life as a breast, each characterized by a different tack he takes in his response to his unique and unprecedented predicament.  Early on, he tries to drown his sorrows in sensual pleasure.  He can't read, he can't walk around, he can't taste or smell, but he can experience sexual pleasure when somebody stimulates his nipple.  And, since he is incapable of orgasm, he could, theoretically, experience sexual pleasure endlessly.  Our narrator becomes obsessed with the idea of having women stroke and squeeze the nipple that his penis has become, or even have intercourse with it as if it was still a penis, but is unable to get much cooperation from the small number of women who enter his hospital room--he strives desperately, beyond all limits of decorum and decency, to persuade the nurse who gives him his daily sponge bath to satisfy his desires, without success.  Long-suffering Claire agrees to stimulate the nipple with her hand and mouth, but for only brief periods.  (Perhaps significantly, Claire was always resistant to having anal sex with Kepesh, or to letting him ejaculate into her mouth.)  Kepesh, in what he describes as a "battle," achieves some control over this obsession, with the help of his doctors, who provide anesthetizing drugs and assign him a male nurse--Kepesh can't get excited over the idea of a man touching him.  

Kepesh's next method of dealing with his tragedy is denial--he declares that he is not really a huge breast kept alive via tubes in a hospital, but that he has gone insane and is in a mental institution.  He theorizes that teaching Kafka and Gogol year after year has lead to his bizarre delusion that he has become a six-foot long woman's breast.  However, all evidence seems to point to the fact that this seemingly impossible transformation has truly occurred, and Kepesh must accept this incredible fate.

Kepesh's final tack is something of a reversion to form and an abandonment of any pretensions to high values or adult responsibility.  (Maybe we should see Kepesh's transformation as not just from whole man to partial female, but from not quite successful adult to helpless selfish baby.)  Kepesh begins, perhaps only rhetorically, to plan to use his unique malady to become famous and rich, which will attract to him women who will do for him the things Claire and the female nurse he tried to bribe have refused to do.  This book, perhaps, is the first blow in his campaign to become a wealthy celebrity, and the story ends without resolution, though it seems doubtful Kepesh will achieve his wild dreams of escaping the hospital, getting rich through public performances and attracting legions of groupies (he suggests that if the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Charles Manson can do it, he can as well) and enjoying hours-long orgies in which five or six girls, including ones as young as twelve, stimulate him in every way he can imagine.

The Breast is a smooth and easy read, and (despite being the work of a celebrated mainstream literary author) is successful as an SF horror story about helplessness, loss of identity, and one's relationship with one's own body--are we at the mercy of our bodies' needs and limitations, our identities determined by our physical forms, or can we control and transcend the body and create a self with the force of our minds?  So I recommend it. 

But is there more?  Philip Roth won a big stack of awards, awards like America's National Book Award, Britain's W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the Czech Republic's Franz Kafka Prize, so maybe we should be able to wring from this little book something deep. something about life or American culture or something.  Well, let's squeeze until the pips squeak.  Maybe Roth is writing about how men treat women as sex objects, and, in particular, how men (or maybe just American men or Jewish men?) fetishize women's breasts--after the way he has treated women like Claire and his ex-wife, perhaps this horrible transformation is a little bit of cosmic justice.

That feminist read is maybe what we expect to find when reading books in 2021, the era of "Me Too" and all that.  Now I'll wrestle something out of the text that is a little more personal: a theme of debunking of academia and the intellectual elite--Kepesh and his colleagues at the university, and the entire academic enterprise, don't exactly come off as particularly serious or admirable in The Breast.  Here I will take the liberty if connecting The Breast to one of the formative texts in my own life of reading--Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.  Now, Roth doesn't mention Proust in The Breast, but I will trot out our favorite Frenchman anyway.  (Roth does mention Robert Musil, but I haven't read The Man Without Qualities so I can't do anything with that.)  One of the many recurring themes in In Search of Lost Time, and one which struck a chord with me, is the idea that "the pleasures of the intellectual life," as well as friendship, are a sterile waste of time, that what is worthwhile is the pursuit of a variety of sensual, sexual experiences.*  Of course, a more pervasive theme of Proust is that sexual relationships (at least heterosexual ones and those between gay men) are inherently frustrating and disappointing and generally asymmetrical and exploitative (Proust can leave you thinking that people and life are pretty crummy.)  Well, I believe we can see these same sad themes in The Breast--take a look at this passage near the very end:

Well, I don't think I'm going to be able wring anything else out of The Breast.  It's a worthwhile read; maybe I'll read 1977's The Professor of Desire, which, it appears, chronicles Kepesh's life, including his relationship with Claire Ovington, before the fantastical events of The Breast.

*See for example pp. 196-7 and pp. 664-6 of the paperback 1998 Modern Library Edition of Within a Budding Grove (that would be pp. 144-5 and 485-7 in the 2002 hardcover James Grieve trans, which is titled In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.)  

I recently was thrilled to discover, at Karen Wickliff Books here in Columbus, Ohio, a copy of Pocket Books' 1976 paperback, The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.  This book is huge, over 400 pages, and I love the nude idealized Everyman cover.  It's time to crack open this baby and try to grok the first third or so!

The introduction to the volume, dated "February 1974 : New Jersey" (MPorcius's home state!) is full of interesting info on the publishing industry and the life of the professional literary man in the 1960s and '70s.  Some will find Malzberg's bragging that he is the most prolific (70 novels written in 9 years, over 200 short stories in seven years) and best ("there are a few contemporaries in my field who are better novelists than I....but none to whom I will defer as a short-story writer") living writer and editor ("I set records that old-timers still talk about...twenty-two short stories rejected in a morning!") off-putting, but I find this kind of extravagance amusing, and Malzberg leavens his boasting with a big dollop of self-deprecation and a heavy sauce of tragedy.  The most important thing to take from the intro, I believe, is that Malzberg thinks of himself as a literary writer (he hints that Philip Roth was a kind of model for his young self) but, as the literary market had dried up and literary people are envious jerks, his only way of realizing a career as a working writer was to cater to the genre market, especially the science fiction market.  (Don't forget the sleaze market, though!)

"A Reckoning" (1973)

Malzberg writes an intro to each of the 38 stories in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.  In the intro to "A Reckoning" he gushes about how much he loves Cyril Kornbluth's work.  (Malzberg says in the introduction to this volume that "ninety percent" of science fiction writers are "hacks" and that few SF writers can "write at all;" nevertheless I often find him extravagantly praising individual SF writers, including ones like Mack Reynolds whom I think are pretty mediocre.)  Malzberg picks out "The Marching Morons" for praise.  I am a Kornbluth skeptic, and in particular thought "Marching Morons" was bad, and I'm not the only one!  Well let's see what "A Reckoning," which Malzberg tells us is "a pastiche" of the work of Kornbluth, whom he calls "a brother," is all about.

"A Reckoning"'s seven pages are a preliminary report, a sort of summary or prospectus of a much larger report, from a researcher who is finishing up a study of an astronaut, Antonio Smith, who has been lost while penetrating the atmosphere of Jupiter.  The researcher declares that Smith was insane, but it is clear to the reader that the researcher himself is also likely insane.  He claims that he has documents that rival investigators have no access to, has put an explosive booby trap on the documents to dissuade other researchers from getting them, and, furthermore, is in psychic contact with the lost spaceman.  I liked how, like one of the Samuel Johnson's numerous early biographers, the narrator is rushing to get his work published before that of his rivals, whom he calls a bunch of liars.

Malzberg writes again and again about astronauts who are insane, and much of his work takes up the theme that the space program is somehow doomed, either a total waste or literally a threat to humanity.  "A Reckoning" is in this vein; we learn (should the researcher and/or Smith be believed) that Jupiter is inhabited and the visit from Antonio Smith is going to trigger the conquest of Earth by these Jovians.

"A Reckoning" is exactly what we expect from Malzberg; I haven't read The Falling Astronauts or "Out From Ganymede" in years, but "A Reckoning" feels like a condensed version of elements from both of them.  (I'm going to admit I have no idea how this story has anything more in common with a Kornbluth story than does any other Malzberg story.)  It would be easy to criticize Malzberg for doing the same thing again, but I liked seeing its various classic Malzbergian ideas in this concentrated form, so "A Reckoning" gets a thumbs up from me.

("A Reckoning" first appeared in New Dimensions 3 under the title "Notes Leading Down to the Conquest."  Tricky!)

"Letting It All Hang Out" (1974)

In his intro to "Letting It All Hang Out" our man Barry describes how much trouble he had getting this one sold.  It finally appeared in an issue of Fantastic as "Hanging," and, Barry tells us, appears in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg slightly revised.  He also tells us it could have been written by Stanley Elkin. Elkin is one of those important literary writers I know nothing about.

"Letting It All Hang Out," six pages, is a satirical fantasy that suggests that contemporary cliches like "freak out" and "give me five" are actually composed by a guy sitting in an office somewhere.  Every day a messenger comes by to collect the "eight to ten typewritten pages" of new cliches, reminding me of the messenger boys who would come to whatever tavern or rich guy's house at which Samuel Johnson was hanging out to collect copy for the latest issue of The Rambler just before deadline.  The plot of the story concerns the messenger telling the cliche writer that he is being laid off.

I like it.

Introduction to "The Man in the Pocket"

I'm skipping the next story, the sixty page "The Man in the Pocket," because it was integrated into the novel, The Men Inside, which I read and wrote about in 2011. Malzberg's introduction to the story is interesting; he considers that The Men Inside is one of the least read of his novels because it is "not precisely upbeat."  Well, Joachim Boaz and I read it with some care, so, Barry, consider that all your labor on it was worth it!

"Pater Familias" (1972)

This is a collaboration with Kris Neville, and in his intro to the story Malzberg gushes about how great Neville is.  He recommends in particular Neville's "Ballenger's People," which I read in February of 2015, "Cold War," which I read in January of 2015, and "The Price of Simeryl," which I own (in The Far-Out People) but haven't read yet.  "Pater Familias," which Barry informs us is a failed story of his which Neville heavily revised, first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

In the late 1990s a machine will be available for sale that lets you summon your parents from the past for just a few minutes. Why just your parents? Why just a few minutes? This story feels pretty contrived, but is self aware of how contrived it is.

Anyway, the story's narrator, who had a very bad relationship with his father, buys one of these devices and summons his dead father a few times for a chat. Their conversations go so poorly that the narrator's father whips out a knife (he carries it with him to protect himself from the draft rioters endemic to 1988) and kills himself. The next time the narrator summons his father, his rotting corpse appears.  Soon after, the government outlaws the machine.  (I was instantly reminded of that Carter Scholz story I just read--is 1970s SF chockablock with calls for greater government regulation of time travel?)

When I read it I thought this four-page story a little slight, but now that I am reliving "Pater Familias," so to speak, as I write about it, I am laughing, so, thumbs up.

"Going Down" (1975)

Years ago Joachim Boaz and I both read the Malzberg stories from Future City, including the dystopian "Culture Lock," in which the government forces everybody to participate in homosexual orgies.  (At the link is Joachim's blog post on Future City, where we both air our opinions and theories about "Culture Lock," as well as a good Lafferty story, "The World as Will and Wallpaper;" my contributions appear in the comments.)  Well, here is another dystopian Malzberg piece with homosexuality as a theme.  "Going Down" first appeared in the anthology Dystopian Visions, and would later be included in the 1984 anthology Kindred Spirits: An Anthology of Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction. 



You might call "Going Down" a character study. Our narrator (who suffers from dissociative disorder and sometimes talks about himself in the third person) was born on November 22, 1963, the day JFK was murdered, and strongly identifies with the young monarch of America's Camelot, even indulging in the fantasy that Kennedy's soul passed into his infant body on that fateful day.  As he grows older the narrator is disappointed in his life; he sees JFK as a man who fulfilled all of his desires, while he himself is a failure, a stifled man who works at a government welfare agency where he deals with violent and grasping public assistance cases who browbeat him.

The 1980s and '90s depicted in the story include some crazy elements; for example, the Kennedy clan is worshipped by the masses--on "Kennedy Day" government employees are required to attend a weird ceremony in which dancers reenact the Dallas assassination and a giant image of JFK's face ("sixteen feet high") is hoisted into the air.  (I thought Malzberg was trying to construct parallels between the fall of the Roman Republic and the JFK assassination, with JFK as a Julius Caesar figure; it is implied that JFK's brothers and/or son become president, forming a dynasty, or at least that American presidents take the name of "Kennedy" the way the Roman emperors took the name "Caesar.")

In hopes of becoming the man he would like to be, the narrator pays a considerable sum of money for therapy at an "Institute."  Several of the short chapters of this at times fragmented and oblique 22-page story are internal correspondence penned by Institute personnel.  The narrator receives a sort of hypnotic dream therapy which allows him to experience, as if they really happened, his desires to have anal sex with young boys, adult men, and animals.  The good people at the Institute also throw murder and incest into the mix; this story is full of violent gay sex.  There are also characters who may be real, may merely by products of the therapy or the narrator's insanity, or metaphorical representations of portions of the narrator's psyche, or some combination thereof.  Does the therapy work?  I guess that depends on your perspective; the narrator does not achieve his dreams of being "satisfied in every orifice," like his hero JFK, but the therapy does seem to calm him down ("He feels nothing.")  Something like a lobotomy or a neutering, perhaps?

Crazy and potentially offensive in any number of ways (it seems to both render conventional and to pathologize homosexuality), "Going Down" is absorbing, and I think better than most of the Kennedy-related Malzberg stories I have read.  I also appreciated how it had a recognizable plot arc, actual characters, and memorable images, things we don't always get from our wild and crazy buddy Barry.
   
"Those Wonderful Years" (1973)

This is a pretty mainstream literary story on the theme of how the past can serve as a stable foundation but also as an albatross that can hold you back if you become too attached to it.  The narrator is an insurance claims investigator who is not only obsessed with old pop music ("golden oldies"), but actually lives his life with a deliberate effort to create memories for which he can be nostalgic in the future.  His relationship with his girlfriend, who thinks the nostalgia craze is a government plot to distract people from the problems of the present, collapses when she insists he make a serious commitment to her and start "living in the now."  Malzberg suggests that the girlfriend is like one of the accident victims whose claims he has been able to deny by scrupulous investigation of the facts and following of the rules, that the narrator's commitment to his values has lead him to lack compassion and charity and fail to support others when he might have.  Is it possible that this man who is obsessed with happy memories is actually piling up a bunch of regrets?

Not bad.  "Those Wonderful Years" was first published in Frontiers 1: Tomorrow's Alternatives, the cover of which depicts a naked girl in an egg with a giant frog.  (You may recall that I own a copy of Frontiers 2: The New Mind, the cover of which depicts a naked man with his arm chopped off.)   

"On Ice" (1973)

In his intro to the story Malzberg says "On Ice" is probably the most controversial story ever published in Amazing.  "Letters were violent for months afterward," he relates, and admits that it "pains" even him to reread it!

"On Ice" uses the same conceit as "Going Down," which would appear two years later. (Maybe I should have read these stories in chronological order?  Well, in the intro to the volume Malzberg warns us that some took years to sell, so publication order doesn't match the order in which they were composed, so probably it doesn't matter.)  There is an Institute where you can get hypnotherapy which gives you the experience of having sex with whoever you want, including your parents.  The first paragraph of the six-page tale is a graphic depiction of a guy having sex with his mother! (You have to retch or laugh, or both, at lines like "'Give it to me, son!' she shrieks....")

The use of the therapy in this story parallels the issue of drugs in real life, and seems also to be some kind of lament about money and how it (according to Malzberg) corrupts people and society.  The therapy, of course, is supposed to be used sparingly to cure the patient of psychological problems, but the narrator uses it as recreation.  A doctor warns him that he may become addicted, but the narrator, accurately, asserts that the Institute will keep giving him his fix as long as he pays, that they care more about money than actually helping people.  I detected a possible caricature of libertarian ideology in the story, as the narrator repeatedly talks about how he is "free," thanks to his wealth and society's technological developments, to do whatever he wants as long as he isn't hurting anyone.  In the last therapy session in the story the narrator eagerly indulges in a scenario in which he rapes and tortures the ineffectual doctor who tried to get between him and his pleasure.

This is a graphic, shocking piece of work, and it is easy to see why it would be controversial.  But I don't think it is gratuitous; it is economical, has a provocative point of view, and is effective.

**********

I don't want to sound like a fanboy, but I have to admit that all six of these stories, and all the introductory material, are good.  I'm even more pleased than before to have got my hands on a copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg; this is a must for all Malzberg fans and for those interested in literary SF from the '60s and '70s.  And I still have over 250 pages to go!

“You see, Miss Moore,” Mandleman says, “let me, if I may, explain to you a few basic facts and so on and then your mind will be set at ease and there will be no difficulty. It is impossible to maintain these buildings properly. These people are pigs; the way they live is indescribable. They are not like you and me but are rather totally undisciplined and on a level of savagery.”

In our last episode we talked about a sex novel by Barry Malzberg which, instead of glorifying sexual promiscuity and celebrating sexual liberation, portrayed sex as degrading, unfulfilling and exploitative. Well, here's another Malzberg paperback sex novel, this one from 1972 and available currently as an e-book from Prologue Books, Horizontal Woman.  Let's see if our buddy Barry takes a different tack in this one.

(Check out the blog Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books for a different take on Horizontal Woman and an idea of what the 1972 edition, and a 1977 reissue under the title Social Worker, looked like.)

Elizabeth Moore is a 23-year-old in 1964 who, after college (at "Beloit University") moved from the MidWest to Brooklyn to work for the New York City welfare administration. An "investigator" who visits recipients of public aid in their homes and throws around a lot of Freudian theory and jargon ("decompensated" seems to be her favorite word), she has her own theories and methods of how to lift her clients out of poverty--she has sex with them to raise their self esteem!

...helping her clients to get better so that they could recover their self esteem and get off relief and assume a higher socio-economic level and begin to lead normal middle-class lives.

Three clients who receive this innovative and much-welcomed service from the comely Miss Moore are the focus of the narrative. We've got Puerto Rican father of about a half dozen kids, Felipe Morales, who hasn't worked for fifteen years due to a self-diagnosed heart condition (no doctor has ever been able to diagnose this condition.)  There's 18-year old African-American (the text says "Negro") William Buckingham III, who starts pimping Moore out to his friends after his third or fourth bout of intercourse with her. And there's Rabbi Schnitzler, a Lubavitcher and father of 13, who becomes ridden with guilt after his first session with Elizabeth and actually confesses to his wife (who, incidentally, is pregnant with number 14.)

Another important character is Elizabeth's supervisor, James Oved, a black man who, when he isn't upbraiding her for being too soft on the clients ("you letting those cats take you over the coals with a lot of lies and old bullshit")--which is most of the time--is always aggressively asking her out and calling her a "prejudiced chick" when she turns him down.

Horizontal Woman is an exploration of liberal guilt and an indictment of the welfare state. And in the same way you might say that Everything Happened to Susan was about gender and relationships between men and women, Horizontal Woman could be said to be about race and ethnicity and relationships between blacks and whites, Jews and Gentiles, etc.

Malzberg does not paint Morales, Buckingham (Moore calls him "Willie"), and Schnitzler as sympathetic; they are obviously poor due to laziness and foolishness and not due to racism or oppression or bad luck or whatever. They are not above lying to Moore or any other government agent to get more benefits, and we witness other welfare recipients ("the relief class") casually throwing trash around their neighborhoods and acting boorishly. Willie, apparently, is a burglar, among other things. For her part, while Moore claims to care about them, she (like the entire government apparatus) treats the poor not like equal citizens, but contemptuously and condescendingly, like they are "retarded" children ("at this socio-economic level, how subtle can you be?" she wonders at one point.)  She tells Schnitzler his religion is silly and should be abandoned, and when confronted by a gang of Willie's friends, admits to herself that black youths all look the same to her.

A pivotal scene in the middle of the novel is a flashback that shows why Moore has taken up her bizarre and risky policy of having sex with her clients. When she confronted a Jewish landlord, Holocaust survivor Irving Mandleman, over the terrible conditions in which his welfare recipient tenants live, Mandeman explains that the tenants are to blame for their poor living conditions because they are savages and pigs (see above) and that the only person who really cares about these people is Mandleman himself!  He keeps them alive even though he loses money by sheltering them (the taxpayers pay their rent, of course, but it doesn't cover Mandleman's bills.)

"The Mayor's office is not populated with people who would take them into their homes for bed and board.  The liberal politicians are for relief only because giving them relief will keep them at a distance and keep the society from crumbling."

Mandelman asserts that even Moore doesn't really care about the poor: "you are so industrious and so dedicated but the fact is that you are only reacting to your own disgust.  You have no more feeling for these people than the office of the Mayor, believe me."  Moore starts her insane policy of having sex with her clients that very day as a way of proving to herself that she does care.

In the final third of the book, Oved, calling her a "dirty little Jewish cunt," tells Moore she is being transferred to the Bronx.  Her last visits to her clients are disastrous. Morales, crying out "Morales not a pig or a chicken, he a man," rapes her, Willie's mother threatens her with a broom ("You smart white bitch...you lucky I don't take a knife to you") and Willie reveals to her he has "the clap."  When she gets back to the building where her office is she finds that hundreds of Hasidim have laid siege to the place, looking for her; the last sentence of the book leaves you to wonder if she escapes with her life.

This is another Malzberg book about which I have to warn readers who may be easily offended, it being full of unflattering stereotypes. There's the vulgar and oversexed Negroes, religious people who breed like rabbits, the ethnocentric ("there are a few orthodox Jews in these tenements which, I agree, somewhat lifts the level of tenancy") Jewish slumlord, and the white liberal who has jungle fever (though Elizabeth claims "her passions in fornication with the clients have been purely on the professional level....")

Horizontal Woman is not as funny as Everything Happened to Susan, but it is a better novel. Elizabeth Moore is a better character than Susan; not only does she have an interesting psychology, but she has agency and makes important decisions that drive the narrative, whereas Susan was just a passive victim.  Morales, Willie, Schnitzler, Mandleman and Oved all inspire some feeling in the reader, unlike the flat caricatures we found in Everything Happened to Susan.  I actually think Malzberg's little work here fits into the same genre or tradition of Jewish-American writing that addresses the issue of Jewish and African-American life in the New York-New Jersey area in which reside Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet. And there are some good jokes, and it is also just possible someone might find the sex in this book to be titillating, particularly someone into exhibitionism, group sex, voyeurism, and/or interracial sex.

A quick read that is worth a look for Malzberg fans and those interested in subversive (what today we would call "politically incorrect") vintage paperbacks.

"Since when do Jewish people live in Short Hills?  They couldn't be real Jews believe me." 

"They're real Jews," I said.

"I'll see it I'll believe it."

Readers of this blog and followers of my twitter feed may be aware that I recently moved to Columbus, Ohio.  MPorcius Fiction Log super-fans may recall that I read Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint in my college days, and a second time in 2014, and enjoyed it.  So, when I saw this handsome paperback copy of Goodbye, Columbus among the vintage paperbacks at one of the Half Price Books locations here in Columbus, I felt I had to have it.  Like Marcel in Swann's Way imagining what a town is like based on its name, I often try to predict what a book will be based on its title.  I theorized that Goodbye, Columbus was a novel about a Jewish guy who was raised in Columbus, OH and left to become a literary writer in New York or a screenwriter in Los Angeles and was amazed by how different attitudes about sex and family life are on the coasts.  Would he embrace these "modern" values for good, or just dabble in sexual promiscuity and careerism and then return home?

These idle predictions of mine generally are not very close to the mark (remember when I thought Neal Barrett's Kelwin was going to be full of thrilling sex and violence?) and this prediction was no better than usual.  Goodbye, Columbus isn't even a novel, but a novella (97 pages in my 1963 Bantam paperback); this volume is rounded out to 216 pages by five short stories.

Goodbye, Columbus is set in my home state of New Jersey--in fact our narrator Neil Krugman, who works at the Newark public library, is, as I am, an alumnus of Rutgers University, though he had classes in Newark and I attended classes in New Brunswick.  (I didn't live on campus, but some 35 miles away with my parents, who weren't yet interested in financing my escape from them; I had to wait until grad school to get that kind of financing.)  As I suppose we expect from post-war 20th century American fiction, 1959's Goodbye, Columbus, is about sex, class and race.  The plot follows Neil's summer romance, but perhaps more interesting than the protagonist's sexual relationship are the work's themes of the question of what constitutes an "authentic" Jew, hostility to the wealthy, and the disdain city dwellers have for suburbanites and vice versa.

At his cousin's country club Neil, 23, meets college girl Brenda Patimkin and they begin dating.  The Patimkins own a business with a vast warehouse "in the heart of the Negro section of Newark" that produces sinks, but they live in Short Hills, a tony suburb.  Roth contrasts the Patimkins, Jews who achieved financial success and left Newark for a big suburban house, black servants and country club memberships, with the Krugmans, a less affluent family who still reside in Newark.  Air-conditioning serves as one of the symbols of the Patimkin's affluence and their social distance from the Krugmans.  The story takes place in the summer, and Roth reminds us again and again how hot it is.  Neil's parents are spending the season in dry Arizona because of their asthma, while Neil's aunt and uncle, with whom he is living, have to sit outside their Newark apartment to escape the heat of indoors.  Brenda's wealthy suburban family, on the other hand, has air conditioning, a fact of which we are reminded repeatedly.

The Patimkins are friendly and accommodating, even inviting Neil to stay with them during his two weeks of vacation from the library.  To me, it seemed like a central thread of the story was the temptation of Neil; would he abandon his relatively lower status family, the city and his government job, for the wealth and prestige, the career in private business, and the suburban comfort of the Patimkins? The Patimkins strongly suggest that if Neil marries Brenda he will be offered a job at Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks ("Any Size--Any Shape.")  While the Krugmans are unhealthy and bookish, the hearty Patimkins are obsessed with sports, and there are numerous scenes in which Brenda and her siblings convince Neil to competitively run, swim, and play table tennis--is he becoming one of them?

While Neil is tempted by the Patimkin lifestyle, he himself is a tempter, wheedling and cajoling Brenda into satisfying his sexual desires.  Neil (like Portnoy in Portnoy's Complaint) can be quite aggressive sexually, and badgers Brenda into going to Manhattan to get a diaphragm; he says he will enjoy sex with her more if she uses one.  Brenda does his bidding, but the device triggers the crisis that ends their relationship when, after Brenda has returned to school in Boston, Mrs. Patimkin finds it while tidying up Brenda's room.  Neil, who has never really felt like he has belonged among the Patimkins, and has always feared Brenda's rejection, accuses Brenda of deliberately leaving the diaphragm in a place where her family would find it.  Neil tells Brenda she has to chose between her family and Neil, and she chooses her family in terms that make her seem materialistic: "They're still my parents.  They did send me to the best schools, didn't they?  They have given me everything I wanted, haven't they?"

This is a smooth economical story full of interesting stuff.  We have Roth's negative portrayal of the wealthy: bubbling under Neil's narrative is a hostility to the rich and Roth's suggestion that the Patimkin's wealth is ill-gotten, somehow dirty.  Most people I meet seem to think anybody who has more money than they do stole it, or somehow enjoy unfair advantages that enabled them to get it--even the millionaires I encounter are always decrying billionaires for their alleged cheating and unfair advantages, and of course every time you open the newspaper or turn on the TV you'll hear rich people enthusiastically denouncing other rich people's wealth.  Goodbye, Columbus fits comfortably in this shopworn genre.

One vector of attack Roth employs to make this point is Brenda's little sister, ten-year-old Julie, a spoiled brat who loves to play sports and games, but apparently only because everybody lets her win.  When Neil is left to babysit her he refuses to let her win at ping pong and prevents her from cheating, so she throws a fit, abandoning the game when Neil is on the brink of scoring the winning point. I have to assume that Julie here represents wealthy people in general, that Roth is arguing that society's winners only succeed because they cheat.

Goodbye, Columbus first appeared in the Fall-Winter 1958-9 issue of The Paris Review

More directly, Mr. Patimkin admits to Neil that to succeed in business "you need a little of the gonif in you."  Neil translates this as "thief," and Patimkin endorses our hero's definition.  "You know more than my own kids.  They're goyim, my kids...."

Roth also covers the sour grapes angle, hinting that the Patimkins cannot truly enjoy their wealth, even that it stifles them.  The oft-mentioned air conditioning prevents them from opening the windows, for example.  Neil discovers that Mr. Patimkin has spent a vast sum on a bar with every "kind and size of glass, ice bucket, decanter, mixer, swizzle stick, shot glass, pretzel bowl" and dozens of bottles of booze, but that none of the bottles have been opened, because nobody in the family drinks or has friends who drink.  And then there is Brenda's older brother Ron, who has to discard his hopes of being a gym teacher and work at the sink factory because of "responsibilities."

As the spoily back cover of the book tells prospective readers, Goodbye, Columbus is not a love story; Neil is primarily attracted to Brenda's body.  But I think another thing that attracts Neil to Brenda, and one of the vicarious pleasures the story offers to readers who envy the wealthy, is the chance to "stick it" to the rich.  Brenda complains that Neil is often "nasty" to her because he resents her family's wealth, though at times she seems to find this nastiness attractive (just as those internet pick up artist guys would predict!)  I've already pointed out how Neil refused to give in to little Julie's demands and defeated her at table tennis; Roth encourages the reader to see Julie and Brenda as different forms of the same person--the girls dress alike, and sometimes sing together, for example, and, like Julie, Brenda loves sports and games and is accustomed to winning ribbons in tennis and horseback riding.  The evening of the same day that Neil humiliates Julie at table tennis, he has sex with Brenda for the first time, and directly likens his sexual conquest to defeating Julie at ping pong:

How can I describe loving Brenda?  It was so sweet, as though I'd finally scored that twenty-first point.  

The fact that "When I began to unbutton her dress she resisted me," further makes Neil's sexual relationship with Brenda seem like a competition, like the table tennis match, one in which he has proven himself the winner over one of his social superiors.

The epigraph I chose for this blog post, a section of dialogue between Neil and his aunt, like Mr. Patimkin's strange claim that his own children are goyim, explicitly brings up the idea of Jewish authenticity--in 20th century America, who is a "real" Jew?  Are any of the characters in the story authentic Jews?  Neil and Brenda are totally secularized--when frustrated Brenda cries out "Jesus Christ!", and when asked by Brenda's mother, who is very active at her synagogue, if he is orthodox or conservative, Neil, who never goes to temple and doesn't mind working on Rosh Hashanah, can't come up with a straight answer.

Even though Brenda's father, with his Yiddish, and mother, with her piety, see themselves as authentic Jews, Roth takes pains to paint the Patimkin family as essentially inauthentic.  On their first date Brenda tells Neil she had a nose job, and I certainly got the impression that all the tennis and horseriding and scenes at the country club were supposed to make us think of the Patimkins as wannabe WASPs.  Then there is Ron, a skilled athlete who went to Ohio State (here's our Columbus, Ohio connection) who also got a nose job and who over the course of the novella abandons his dream of becoming a gym teacher to take up a management job at his father's plant, a job we see he is totally unsuited for.

It is possible that Roth is asking the question of who is an authentic Jew without providing an answer,  or that his answer is that nobody in 20th century America can truly be an authentic Jew, but I am going to go out on a limb here and propose the theory that Roth's story argues that being a true adherent of Jewish tradition is not about maintaining centuries-old language or millennia-old religious rituals, but identifying with and trying to help the downtrodden.  Which brings us to the topic of race in Goodbye, Columbus.

A film of Goodbye, Columbus was released in 1969; I have not seen it

There are several black minor characters in the novella, and a minor white character (John McKee, a man who dresses well and thus represents the rich or those who aspire to be rich) who also works at the library and complains about how blacks ruin the public housing the white taxpayers provide them and vandalize library books and masturbate in the stacks while looking at art books.  Our narrator not only pokes fun at this colleague and his views, but identifies with and defends "Negroes."  When Brenda's family asks Neil to babysit Julie, Neil tells us that "I felt like Carlota [the Patimkin's black maid]."  A young "colored boy" (we never learn his name) comes regularly to the library to look at art books, in particular a volume of Gauguin reproductions, and Neil puts his job on the line when he lies to a white library patron to keep him from borrowing the Gauguin book.  Neil even has a dream in which he and the boy are companions on a sailing ship.

While Neil champions and identifies with blacks, the Patimkins, who employ black domestics at home and many black men at the factory, treat them as subordinates.  I suspect we are meant to contrast a scene at the factory in which Mr. Patimkin and hapless Ron order their black employees around with a scene in the library in which Neil talks with the young art lover about Gauguin, treating him, more or less, as if he is an equal.

In the same way that the inauthenticity of the Patimkins is signalled early on (page 9) by the revelation of those nose jobs, I think Roth signals how important characters' dealings with blacks should be to our assessment of them even earlier (page 5), when Neil calls Brenda to ask for that first date:

"What's your name?" she said.

"Neil Klugman.  I held your glasses at the board, remember?"

She answered me with a question of her own, one, I'm sure, that is an embarrassment to both the homely and the fair.  "What do you look like?"

"I'm . . . dark."

"Are you a Negro?"

An interesting nuance to the way Roth addresses this topic is that while Neil is the character with the most sympathy for blacks, it seems like he also has the least experience with them; the Patimkins deal with blacks almost everyday, and McKee suggests that Neil's cavalier attitude about the housing projects is the result of his not living near any of them.

Another wrinkle: the portrait Roth paints of blacks in the story is not exactly a flattering one.  The "colored" characters don't have much agency or personality, they seem to be there to provide an opportunity for us to distinguish between the good whites and the bad whites, you might even call them pawns in white vs white or Jew vs Jew status games.  In the same way Roth has Mr. Patimkin, the businessman, liken businesspeople to gonifs, and reproduces a letter written by Mr. Patimkin that is full of odd spellings and punctuation, Roth puts evidence of black dysfunction in the mouth of the Gauguin-loving little boy, the most well-developed black character.  The child not only pronounces "art book" as "heart book" and "Gauguin" as "Mr. Go-again," but engages in conversations with Neil like this:

"Who took these pictures?" he asked me.

"Gauguin.  He didn't take them, he painted them.  Paul Gauguin.  He was a Frenchman."

"Is he a white man or a colored man?"

"He's white."

"Man," the boy smiled, chuckled almost, "I knew that.  He don't take pictures like no colored man would.  He's a good picture taker...."

One reason the child likes Gauguin is that the Tahiti depicted by Gauguin appears to be a place of peace, evidently unlike the African-American Newark neighborhood where he lives: "These people, man, they sure does look cool.  They ain't no yelling or shouting here, you could just see it."  When Neil asks the boy why he doesn't get a library card and borrow the book, he admits that a nice book wouldn't be safe where he lives: "What you keep telling me take that book home for?  At home somebody dee-stroy it."

Goodbye, Columbus is a good story, thought-provoking and fun, full of sex and jokes and all the race and class stuff I've been talking about (and just as much stuff about the relationships between men and women and between parents and children that I haven't talked about.)  The writing is deft, with vivid little details, but never so much description that it drags.  Definitely worth a look.

"Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke!  I am the son in the Jewish joke--only it ain't no joke!"

No, this is not a book on public relations

I first read Portnoy's Complaint during my freshman year of college; not for a class, mind you, but out of my own curiosity.  (On July 14 of 1763 Johnson told Boswell that "a plan of study" was a waste of time, because you won't get any good out of what you read "as a task," and I have certainly felt this to be true in my own life.)  I can still recall puzzling over Portnoy's Complaint's last few pages, in which the narrator's ranting includes a reference to his model Hawker Hurricane, a symbol of his youthful patriotism and decency, as I sat in a huge auditorium where I was one of the multitude taking an intro course on psychology.  I spent most of these sessions looking out the window at the squirrels gamboling about the Rutgers campus.

Late last week I borrowed a copy of the 1967 novel from a nearby university library. This copy was previously read by (I presume) an Asian student, and is full of marginalia in what I take to be Chinese or Japanese script.  It is interesting to consider that there may be some businessman or government official over in Beijing or Yokohama whose view of the United States and/or the Jewish people is strongly colored by his or her close reading of this novel that chronicles a young man's use of masturbation aids vegetable, animal and mineral.

Portnoy's Complaint is written in the form of thirty-something Alexander Portnoy's confessions to a psychologist, and rather than a straightforward narrative, consists of a series of vignettes.  In fact it is quite like a stand up comedy routine: jokes about constipation and jerking off; jokes about Jewish guilt and stifling nagging parents (the ignorant bigoted father who works himself to the bone and resents his employers, the self-important mother who brags about how clean her house is) who always ask why you don't call, don't visit, don't give them grand kids; jokes about trouble with the opposite sex. There's even a joke about how it is (allegedly) illegal to tear that tag off your mattress.

Roth invites you to compare the novel to a comedy monologue, titling the last chapter "Punch Line" and referring in the text to Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Henny Youngman and Milton Berle.  Young Alex Portnoy, in fact, cracks up his friends and family with his imitations of characters from the Allen and Benny radio shows, and, when as an adult he is unhappy about his life as a childless bachelor, Portnoy imagines the ideal life to be sitting around with his kids, listening to Allen and Benny on the radio.

Fortunately for the reader, Roth is really quite funny, and the quasi-comic routine format works like a charm.  I smiled and laughed again and again at the stories and jokes Portnoy tells his head shrinker.
 
The not-quite linear plot of the novel follows Portnoy, a highly intelligent (first in his class year after year after year) Jewish boy who grows up in urban Northern New Jersey and becomes a lawyer who dedicates his career to helping "the people."  He moves to New York City and works for the city as the Assistant Commissioner for the Commission on Human Opportunity.  Our narrator's relationships with his parents, his relationships with women, and especially his sex life take center stage.  Perhaps due to psychological problems resulting from his relationships with is mother and father, Portnoy is obsessed with "cunt," especially that of "shikses." As a youth he masturbates furiously, employing all sorts of weird complements to this activity, and conducting this self-abuse in some of the riskiest places (on a bus going over the Pulaski Skyway sitting next to a shikse in a tartan skirt).  As an adult he is totally unable to settle down with one woman, no matter how intelligent, charming or beautiful, and instead moves from one woman to the next, boldly propositioning women he sees on the street.

One of the women he picks up on the streets of Manhattan is a beautiful ignoramus from West Virginia, a twenty-nine-year-old fashion model nicknamed "the Monkey" because she once indulged the urge to eat a banana during an odd erotic encounter. The Monkey wants to settle down, marry and make a family with Portnoy, and, on a trip to Vermont, Portnoy feels he may be falling in love with her.  But can a Jewish leftist genius really marry a gentile who can only barely read, even if they share a fascination with sexual perversion?

Portnoy's Complaint is a lot of fun.  Of course, part of the appeal of the novel for me is its milieu: Northern New Jersey, where I grew up (the town I lived in as a child even merits a mention!), and New York, where I lived the interesting part of my life.  I hadn't thought about the Pulaski Skyway in months, and I was pleased to be reminded of this tremendous edifice, one of the "monuments to man's ingenuity and ambition" I was always telling skeptical in-laws and rural and suburban naysayers abounded in the New York area.  But the novel has a broad appeal; most of us have parents or parental figures we have complicated feelings about, don't we?  Most of us have complex and mixed feelings about sex, yes?  The position of Jews in American society, the feelings of Jews towards gentiles and vice versa, are a major theme of the book, but, in this multicultural society, don't all of us belong to some ethnic or cultural, regional or class group, that looks at (and is looked upon by) the other components of American society with a mixture of curiosity, envy, fear, and/or disdain?

The novel is also full of clever observations and cunning depictions; here is one from early in the book:

This is a man who somewhere along the line got the idea that the basic unit of meaning in the English language is the syllable.  So no word he pronounces has less than three of them, not even the word God.  You should hear the song and dance he makes out of Israel.  For him it's as long as refrigerator!  And do you remember him at my bar mitzvah, what a field day he had with Alexander Portnoy?  Why, Mother, did he keep calling me by my whole name?  Why, except to impress all you idiots in the audience with all those syllables!  And it worked!  

Do I need to catalog the myriad ways people might be offended by this novel?  Point out that it is worthy of a blizzard of trigger warnings?  Portnoy wonders if the sleeping blonde sitting next to him on the bus is merely faking, hoping he will grope her; more than once he tries to physically pressure women into surrendering to his desires. Portnoy promulgates the theory that a stifling mother is what turns a boy into a homosexual.  We won't get into what Portnoy's parents think of "schvartzes," but here is what Portnoy senior has to say about my own people (well, on my paternal grandfather's side):

A Polack's day, my father has suggested to me, isn't complete until he has dragged his big dumb feet across the bones of a Jew.

Ouch!

Of course I am recommending that you read Portnoy's Complaint.  Roth is one of those American literary masters with a Pulitzer Prize, multiple volumes in the Library of America, and all that, one of those guys you are supposed to read.  But nobody would consider this book a bore or a difficult challenge, like we can expect some to find Nabokov or Bellow or Melville or (parts of) Henry Miller; Portnoy's Complaint moves along quickly and is full of laughs.  The novel also offers some kind of insight into mid-century Jewish-American life, and laughing and learning about how other people have lived are two of the big reasons we read books, aren't they?