Isaac Mizrahi, Tom Perrotta, Janet Malcolm, Lorrie Moore: All are united by their love of Philip Roth.
My father had lost most of the sight in his right eye by the time he'd reached eighty-six, but otherwise he seemed in phenomenal health for a man his age when he came down with what the Florida doctor diagnosed, incorrectly, as Bell's palsy, a viral infection that causes paralysis, usually temporary, to one side of the face.
The paralysis appeared, out of nowhere, the day after he had flown from New Jersey to West Palm Beach to spend the winter months sharing a sublet apartment with a retired bookkeeper of seventy, Lillian Beloff, who lived upstairs from him in Elizabeth, and with whom he had become romantically involved a year after my mother died in 1981. At the West Palm airport, he had been feeling so fit that he hadn't even bothered with a porter (whom, besides, he would have to tip), and carried his own luggage from the baggage area all the way out to the taxi stand. Then, the next morning, in the bathroom mirror, he saw that half his face was no longer his. What had looked like him the day before now looked like nobody--the lower lid of the bad eye bagged downward, revealing the lid's inner lining, the cheek on that side had gone slack and lifeless as though beneath the bone had been filleted, and his lips were no longer straight but drawn down diagonally across his face.
-Sigrid Nunez says her main advice to any writer is: Don't flinch. "So many people have great material, but then they sit down to write and they look away. They can't confront the story head-on." You can't make that accusation about Roth, who seems drawn, again and again, to the perverse and horrifying and scandalous. Later in "Patrimony," he will write at length about his father's penis. Above, his description of the face is like something from "Saw": the filleting of the cheekbone, the display of the lower lid's inner lining, the diagonal line made by the lips.
-In "The Ghost Writer," Roth sings the praises of Kafka and of Anne Frank, and one thing he enjoys about these writers is their blunt description of madness. In "The Trial," and in "The Diary of Anne Frank," a person is unjustly and relentlessly persecuted; there is no satisfying explanation for the persecution, and it arrives without context, like a nightmare. "Patrimony" has a Kafka-esque opening. To wake up and discover that half your face is "no longer yours": Isn't this like Gregor Samsa, discovering that he has become a cockroach, or the guy in "The Trial," discovering that he has violated a mysterious law no one will bother to articulate for him?
-Lorrie Moore--I think--called "Patrimony" an "icy valentine." It is full of a son's pain and ambivalence and love. Only a son could gently mock the protagonist--"He would never call a porter....whom he'd have to tip"--in the same paragraph where the protagonist "loses" half his face. And the rest of the book is just as weird and disturbing and inappropriately funny as that. More later!
My father had lost most of the sight in his right eye by the time he'd reached eighty-six, but otherwise he seemed in phenomenal health for a man his age when he came down with what the Florida doctor diagnosed, incorrectly, as Bell's palsy, a viral infection that causes paralysis, usually temporary, to one side of the face.
The paralysis appeared, out of nowhere, the day after he had flown from New Jersey to West Palm Beach to spend the winter months sharing a sublet apartment with a retired bookkeeper of seventy, Lillian Beloff, who lived upstairs from him in Elizabeth, and with whom he had become romantically involved a year after my mother died in 1981. At the West Palm airport, he had been feeling so fit that he hadn't even bothered with a porter (whom, besides, he would have to tip), and carried his own luggage from the baggage area all the way out to the taxi stand. Then, the next morning, in the bathroom mirror, he saw that half his face was no longer his. What had looked like him the day before now looked like nobody--the lower lid of the bad eye bagged downward, revealing the lid's inner lining, the cheek on that side had gone slack and lifeless as though beneath the bone had been filleted, and his lips were no longer straight but drawn down diagonally across his face.
-Sigrid Nunez says her main advice to any writer is: Don't flinch. "So many people have great material, but then they sit down to write and they look away. They can't confront the story head-on." You can't make that accusation about Roth, who seems drawn, again and again, to the perverse and horrifying and scandalous. Later in "Patrimony," he will write at length about his father's penis. Above, his description of the face is like something from "Saw": the filleting of the cheekbone, the display of the lower lid's inner lining, the diagonal line made by the lips.
-In "The Ghost Writer," Roth sings the praises of Kafka and of Anne Frank, and one thing he enjoys about these writers is their blunt description of madness. In "The Trial," and in "The Diary of Anne Frank," a person is unjustly and relentlessly persecuted; there is no satisfying explanation for the persecution, and it arrives without context, like a nightmare. "Patrimony" has a Kafka-esque opening. To wake up and discover that half your face is "no longer yours": Isn't this like Gregor Samsa, discovering that he has become a cockroach, or the guy in "The Trial," discovering that he has violated a mysterious law no one will bother to articulate for him?
-Lorrie Moore--I think--called "Patrimony" an "icy valentine." It is full of a son's pain and ambivalence and love. Only a son could gently mock the protagonist--"He would never call a porter....whom he'd have to tip"--in the same paragraph where the protagonist "loses" half his face. And the rest of the book is just as weird and disturbing and inappropriately funny as that. More later!
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