In reviewing books over the past ten years or so, I have frequently criticised modern literature for its pretentiousness. This pretentiousness comes in varied forms and I have alluded to some of them (writers such as Joyce, Winton and McCarthy declining to observe the conventions of punctuation, for instance), but the qualities that irritate me are often hard to articulate. Take Catch-22; I loathe every page of that novel and yet it is difficult to offer concrete examples, other than to say that the dialogue and the plot are completely removed from reality.
(And yes I know Catch-22 is supposed to be an absurdist satire. For an example of absurdist satire done well, I would recommend A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. But I digress.)
Then a few weeks ago, upon recommendation from my mother, I started reading Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. This author won the National Book Award in 1959, but came to wider prominence in the late 1960s for his salacious and sensationalist content, and I could remember my mother sharing the odd titbit from his books when I was a teenager. So I was eager to get started on Portnoy’s Complaint and see what the fuss was about.
While it’s not usually to my taste, I was happy to go along with Roth’s stream-of-consciousness narrative at first because his 'dysfunctional Jew' shtick and confessional style presented him as a literary precursor to such notable writers as Larry David, Joseph Epstein and Eileen Pollack.
But then on page 49, I decided to put the book down and not pick it up again. The passage below – supposedly the protagonist reliving a fond moment from his childhood – is the reason why:
On my fingertips... I smell my lunch, my tuna fish salad. Ah, it might be cunt I'm sniffing. Maybe it is!
This, to my mind, is emblematic of everything that is wrong with post-modern 'literature'. I’ll bet my dog and lot that no four-year-old in the history of the world has ever had the abovementioned thought, especially while sharing a tender moment with his mother. What it shows is that the author has become so self-absorbed, so desperate to satirise Jewish culture and ‘create an effect’ in the reader's mind, that he has forgotten his first duty is to tell a believable story. Despite its pretention to something higher, this is just plain bad writing.
Subsequent to baulking at that passage, I visited Goodreads and found that many Roth fans tended to agree that Portnoy’s Complaint was not Roth’s finest work. When I handed the book back to my mother, she asked me what I thought of it and I had to explain why I didn’t like it. She then asked me, “Did you read the bit about the liver?”
That refers to a scene (so some research tells me) where the protagonist jacks off into a piece of liver that his mother later serves up to the family for dinner. Quite scandalous for 1969, I’m sure, but for this reader in 2015 it was more like a symbol of what the author did in conceiving his ridiculous, self-indulgent novel.