Taller 1978 and Observer 1985
Philip Roth: No Satisfaction
Philip Roth has just completed a trilogy — the Zuckerman books — and we will come to that in due course. Looking back, though, we see that Roth’s previous nine novels arrange themselves in trilogies too — or they do if you nudge them. To begin with we have the three apprentice works: Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go, which survey the waking novelist’s immediate experience, and When She Was Good, which steps self-consciously outside it. Next we have that lip-smacking threesome of frisky Menippean satires, Our Gang, The Breast and The Great American Novel, where Roth took a manic holiday from his normally sober preoccupations — namely Jewish family life, heartbreak in the Humanities, and the impossibility of getting on with women. Flanking the satires are Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and My Life as a Man (1974), obsessively personal accounts of emotional failure and collapse, followed by The Professor of Desire, which rounds off the trio. Like its weepy, ball-broken hero, David Kepesh, Desire is an oddly helpless, melancholy and apathetic continuation of Roth’s protracted self-scrutiny; having long been adept at turning his life into literature, Roth here lets life just wash all over him. The new persona is the prostrate man, limping from psychiatrist’s couch to psychiatrist’s couch, from bed to bed, and from bad to worse.
Roth’s women. There are three kinds of them, too, and each novel in the trilogy gives emphasis to a different type (I think we had better call it the ‘My Life’ trilogy. But stay, gentile reader: mere Jewishness is seen as ever less central to the Roth predicament, and is given only incidental treatment here). The first kind of girl is the Girl Who Will Do Anything. And not many girls, it seems, will Do that. Portnoy’s Complaint inspected this type most closely, in the person of The Monkey, the hero’s reckless companion, and also, even more enjoyably, through comic fantasy — the world of swinish, gloating sexuality opened up by Thereal McCoy, Portnoy’s dirty-talking, cupcake-nippled phantasm. She reappears as Sharon Shatsky in My Life as a Man and, one book later, as Birgitta, a daring and predatory Scandinavian with whom Kepesh has a tremulous European jaunt. The good thing about these girls is that you can do whatever the hell you like to them in bed. The bad thing is that you wish they wouldn’t let you. While the girls are unfrightened by their own waywardness, the Roth man always is — in the end, anyway. There is something deeply unladylike, also, in the ease with which they get on with their own desires.
The Roth man is not as frightened of the first type of Roth woman as he is of the second type of Roth woman, whom he nonetheless tends to marry. This type is the Ball-Breaker, and her starkest representative in the trilogy is Maureen in My Life as a Man (her prototype, though one brilliantly transposed in social context, was Lucy in When She Was Good). The Ball-Breaker’s mission is to ensnare, flatten and stomp on the Roth man; when she has got him impotent, enervated and wondering if he is a homosexual, she has got him where she wants him. The Ball-Breaker makes a cleverly varied guest-appearance in The Professor of Desire as Helen Kepesh, where added stress is given to her vanity, aimlessness, alcoholism, her grandiose fantasies and her wasted intelligence and beauty. You have to look rather harder for the Ball-Breaker in Portnoy. The Monkey is a handful all right, but she lacks the Ball-Breaker’s destructive energy and deluded self-belief. Who is it, then, who stands over the hero with a knife, who lets him glimpse her menstrual blood, who in some sense ‘marries’ him with ineluct-ably horrendous results? Why, Sophie Portnoy, the Jewish Mother — whose hips, Portnoy can’t help noticing, even towards the end of the novel, ‘aren’t bad …’
The third type of Roth woman does not scare the Roth man. Instead, she is scared by him. She is the tender realist, methodical, protective, self-abnegating. She is not a Dickensian Little Woman; on the contrary, she is a Big Woman, with a determined if precarious working relationship with reality. Despite her past bruises and hurts, she sees things the way things really are, and longs to rescue the Roth man for the sane world: she is, above all, unpsychotic. The Pumpkin and The Pilgrim shared the role of the Big Woman in Portnoy, Susan played her in My Life, and in Desire she edges into centre-stage as Claire, with whom the crippled Roth man, at the end of his tether, played out by all that sex and spite, tries to rebuild his life. The great hitch about the Big Woman, though — and now we see Roth’s anxieties turning full circle — is that they will not quite do Anything. And this tiny omission is enough to allow sexual boredom to nip giggling through the bedroom door; suddenly, a lifetime of depleted possibilities is on view. ‘Anything’, as usual, is symbolised by enthusiastic fellatio (or perhaps it just is enthusiastic fellatio). Claire will do fellatio, but she won’t… you know, do it’ enthusiastically. This is all it takes. Some people are never satisfied.