Musings on My Life As A Man
Happily, I got a few books for Christmas that I'd been desiring for quite some time. Hope you don't mind if I list them for you: Running With Scissors (Augusten Burroughs); America: The Book (Jon Stewart et al); the Ann Lamott book about writing whose title escapes me at the moment; and finally, the subject of this blog post, My Life as a Man (Philip Roth). Hooray! Several weeks' worth of excellent reading lie ahead. (Meanwhile, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women and Bill Clinton's My Life are still staring at me, unfinished, from their respective positions on my nightstand. A-hem.)
My Life as a Man is my second foray into the work of Philip Roth. I started out earlier this year with Portnoy's Complaint, which I ignorantly had known only as "the masturbation book" before I actually read it but which turned out to be much more. In fact, I don't understand why people fixate on that one aspect of the protagonist's character. It's interesting and telling that Portnoy has a compulsion to ejaculate and his father is chronically constipated (likewise, Portnoy seems to spend his life trying half-heartedly to shake Jewish tradition while his father steeps in it), but beyond that, the gritty details of Portnoy's masturbation don't seem so urgently important as to warrant much attention. More significant, I think, is Portnoy's endless dismay over being civic-minded and compassionate yet obsessed with sex (in particular, screwing shiksas). He's neurotic and guilt-ridden and occasionally self-loathing, yet he is, generally speaking, a respected leader the community. It's a type of man that one recognizes, especially in politics and public service.
The protagonist in My Life as a Man, Peter Tarnopol, is similarly uneasy with and disturbed by his own dichotomous character. On one hand, he's a Jewish man from a loving family who excelled as a student and found success early as a writer and professor; on the other hand, his personal life is utterly fucked up. He is ostensibly a person who wants to help others improve themselves (teaching university students how to write, encouraging an inorgasmic girlfriend to try to achieve sexual pleasure), yet he's also known as a "seducer of college girls" and is so insecure that one wonders whether his magnanimous behavior isn't undertaken to bolster his own flagging feelings of self-worth. Most notably, he marries a troubled, verbally abusive woman, named Maureen (!), because she 1) cries pregnancy and 2) threatens to kill herself if he doesn't marry her, then kills herself anyway, and that seems to negatively affect his personal relationships with women for an indefinite amount of time afterward.
Basically, the reader learns about the flawed protagonist (Tarnopol) from Tarnopol's point of view. He is both self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing. What results is narration that comes across as fairly unreliable but revealing just the same. It's also quite entertaining, and the tone is intimate, as if Tarnopol is telling you his life story over several beers in a pub or something.
I'm about two-thirds of the way through, and I'm currently in a section of backstory that comprises, in detail, all the events (from Tarnopol's point of view) leading up to his marriage, attempted divorce, and the eventual loss of his wife altogether. Right now, Tarnopol comes across as self-aware, yet foolish and (to the reader's amusement) obsessed with what is Right and Wrong instead of being concerned about what is stupid and potentially harmful. He's a fairly sympathetic character, but he's not tragic. Yet.
So far, I'm miffed by the reader reviews on Amazon that label this book "depressing" and "bitter." It could have been either of these things if Roth hadn't spent considerable time poking fun at youthful earnestness, academic pretension, and human frailty in general. But because one of Roth's main messages in this novel seems to be, "Look how ridiculous we human beings are! Let's stop taking ourselves so seriously and have a good chuckle over it!" the story doesn't get overwhelmingly sad.
More later, after I finish!
