First, I think it’s only fair to point out that most writing fails to survive such close scrutiny. Secondly, Philip Roth is probably the U.S.'s most critically-praised and generally celebrated living novelist, yada yada yada.
Having said that, this passage is as awkward as ass. The “own” following “our” is redundant. The clauses, while organized as a list suggesting number or importance but rigorously adhering to neither schema, could have been more rigorously parallel to each other.
Worst of all is the incoherent imagery suggested by “taboos”. The only things babies normally take between their teeth, as we all know, are titties and their artificial substitutes. (And maybe occasionally a dog’s ear or an older sibling’s unwashed finger.) More to the point, titties are nourishing, in a fundamentally biological way; taboos are culturally constricting and inhibiting (if necessary for the health of civilization, social mores, and the gene pool), dealing with the erection of boundaries and categories (the raw and the cooked, the kosher and the unclean, the fuckable and the incestuous). If Roth insisted on shoehorning “taboos” in that sentence, it would’ve been preferable to have done so in the context of the baby’s swaddling, diaper, or its crib (especially the jail-like bars of the crib) rather than its suckling, particularly because of the socially and culturally constructed – and imposed – nature of taboos.
But finally there’s the nearly as awkward allusions to repression, suggested by “ideology,” “push,” “urges” and “sent underground”. My problem with this passage is its imprecise conflation of psychological and political repression with implied Christian imagery (“bled,” “enacted,” “self-sacrifice”), suggestive of a self-aggrandizing Portnoy’s redux doubly offensive in its conflation of the personal with the political and of the Jewish with the Gentile. [Does it in fact lay the groundwork for a situation in which a young Jewish character feels constrained by his guilt-tripping parents into concealing his sexual obsession with shiksas, even as he remains a chronic masturbator?] There’s a world of difference between genuine political repression and even a stifflingly religious or moral upbringing by figuratively self-flagellating parents. Besides, no “ideology” of parental self-sacrifice can “push” rebelliousness down *per se * – isn’t that what Portnoy’s was largely about? The urges remain, to be variously repressed by the child or suppressed by the parent… but that can only work up to a certain point.
What I meant was that the newer passage sounds suspiciously like a retread of the same themes he was working on forty years ago in Portnoy’s, although the style in the newer is probably more literary than the confessional prose in the earlier novel.
Not having read anything of Roth’s in twenty-odd years :o , I have no standing to comment on the [de]merits of American Pastoral as a whole *vis-a-vis * style, political correctness, its themes, whether the quoted passage is indeed in reference to a Jewish-American family, or anything else. But there is a vein of excoriating criticism of the Jewish mother in postwar Jewish-American humor and literature that frankly gives me pause (and I’m neither Jewish nor anyone’s mother). Like anything else, its worth depends on how it’s done; but I suspect that the Jewish mother archetype is a locus of much unfair piling-on by [typically young and male] writers who are otherwise painstakingly liberal. A classic cultural blind spot, as it were.
I also feel that it’s a cliched and cynical ploy to conflate one’s familial grievances with larger, political instruments of suffering. [The extreme example of this trend is the trivialization of The Holocaust, often for a cheap laugh.] To put it baldly, I don’t care how f’in hysterical, haranging, and guilt-tripping a nuhdznik one’s Jewish mother is; facing up to her isn’t the same as confronting the Cossacks; living in her basement isn’t starving in a Siberian gulag; and the emasculating aspects of her parenting doesn’t compare to the systematic discrimination and exclusion faced by Jews in, say, the old U.S.S.R. So when Roth sneaks in political code words like “ideology” and “sent underground” in reference to a straitened upbringing, it raises my hackles. As for his use of [Catholic-shaded] religious references (“enacted,” “bled,” “self-sacrifice”), this suggests an effort on his part to write an American novel in a religiously neutral mode, in which characters could be read as being Jewish or Christian, but if that’s the case (and I doubt it), it smacks of trotting out some Catholic window dressing instead of reworking his family psychodynamics.
Worse yet, a reasonable author should expect such an phrase to be interpreted as a reference to “taking the bit between your teeth”, which actually refers to a rejection of control. When an author’s desire for complex structure and imagery leads him to construct something that says the exact opposite of what he’s trying to say, he has failed. I have no idea if this is an aberration, or if Roth regularly outwits himself in this fashion, but the quote in the OP is a mess.
I have no fundamental objection to the style. I just object to it being done poorly.
Thanks, lizardling, but I think what KneadToKnow and I are looking for is an actual cite that Hemingway really wrote/said this, and that it’s not just a legend. I have seen it referenced many places, but it’s always anecdotal.
I’ve read and enjoyed the majority of Roth’s novels but one thing I noticed is that he has mined essentially the same seam over his long career. I can’t recall the specifics now but some of the themes explored in Goodbye, Columbus were echoed strongly in some of his most recent works.
If I was just going off that one sentence, I’d probably say I hate it, but I read American Pastoral in college and I loved it. It’s the only Roth I’ve read, but I keep meaning to pick up some more. It was certainly a challenging novel to read (one of the things that’s kept me from reading more Roth), but it is a favorite. It’s one of those few books that still affects the way I see the world years after I’ve read it and forgotten most of the plot details.