Still, having noticed that I noticed, too, that both books were in their differing ways very much of the times, not least in their both being tales of "White ethnics" caught between their immigrant parents and the mainstream of American life, with their desire to enter into the latter frustrated in various ways. Puzo's Michael Corleone, after Dartmouth, a heroic career in the Marines during World War II and the courtship of the ultra-WASP Kay Adams, nonetheless ended up, as his father wished, out of the armed forces, back home, fighting the family's causes instead of the country's. Moreover, if he in the end married Kay instead of her assimilating him and his family into the American mainstream, she assimilated into his parents' culture as she accepted her place as the don's wife, converted to Catholicism, and walked in the ways of Michael's mother. So did it go with Portnoy's Complaint's Alexander Portnoy somewhat less dramatic misadventures, in which Roth nonetheless depicts, with extraordinary detail and force, what Portnoy felt about how the identity and obligations his family and others imposed on him was something he ever experienced as an obstacle to what he wanted out of life and only that (romantic nonsense about heritage be damned), and his relations with parents and especially a mother to whom such concepts as self-determination, privacy, respect, forgiveness, acceptance, compromise, supportiveness, fair dealing and even the most rudimentary politeness in her relations with her children seem completely alien, such that their intrusiveness and control and manipulation are as unapologetic as they are relentless--things so often presented as charming by third-rate nostalgia-hawkers and fourth-rate humorists in fact grinding, toxic, tormenting, traumatizing, crippling, as Portnoy's "complaint" makes all too clear.
Of course, just as all this has made the books very much of their times--with the sales to prove it--it has also made them look like relics, even awkward relics, a half century on for a later generation in which the relevant ethnicities have become more comfortable in America, and there is very little questioning to be seen anywhere of the ceaseless encouragement of all to take pride in "roots." In line with this sensibility they do not much care to recall the sturm und drang felt by those who lived the process of immigration and assimilation in an America far from easily or gracefully (or even completely) transforming itself "from Anglo-America into Euro-America" as "ancient history," but rather to write it out of history, to drop it down the Memory Hole because of how it conflicts with the attitudes they champion, and would seem to have succeeded in achieving that in a very great degree. (Thus does an occasional Susan Glenn write of such matters, but only for a specialist audience as the history remains far outside the ken of the general public.) All this would seem to have hit Roth's book especially given the accusations laid against him of having played into the hands of Anti-Semites with his creation of Portnoy, if not being an Anti-Semite himself. Meanwhile, changes regarding the "respectable" attitudes toward matters of gender and sex have been even less hospitable to the content of the books, whether the Robbins-y heterosexuality of the macho principals of The Godfather, or the less macho but no less intense heterosexuality of Mr. Portnoy. Still, if feminists tend to be disapproving of Puzo's book when they remark it, given that Puzo has received so little serious attention, and indeed little attention of any kind, he was decreasingly talked about as a writer in his later years next to the far-higher profile--and still more offensive, Roth. A Portnoy speaking his particular truths is outright anathema for them--the things in the male mind, soul and experience Roth lays bare through this character exactly what feminists are insistent on not just delegitimizing generally but protecting the female subjectivity from particularly as a matter of right and necessity. For perhaps never before had anyone treated with such minute, explicit, brutal frankness the drives, obsessions, fantasies, frustrations, furtiveness, awkwardness, embarrassments, bitterness, of male heterosexuality in the relevant phases of life, especially as experienced by one who had the burdens of little privacy growing up, few of the foundations for success with the opposite sex, and the social marginality factoring into both (life with mother not irrelevant here, even if one does not buy into the Freudian element). Indeed, those who, having learned of Richard Hofstadter's ideas about "status politics" described in an academic way would be curious to see a thoroughly fleshed-out dramatization of them--and at that one delving into dark and ugly places where few dare to tread--can hardly do better than pick up Portnoy's Complaint, many of the strongest moments in which derive their charge from the intersection of sex and status, with all that means for the sensitivities Roth's book unavoidably tramples in expressing its truths.
All of this seems to have its reflection in the regrets the authors have expressed about their books. Puzo, before passing in 1999, seems to have had as his main regret that the novel that really made his name and stood as his legacy was not "better written." By contrast Roth was to say in regard to Portnoy's Complaint--the book which did more than any other to put Roth on the map, the book which I imagine far more than any other made him the money that enabled him to enjoy a very privileged, Upper West Side-and-country house, internationally traveling, famous actress-marrying life even as he pursued his passions as a writer, rather than endure the far more common fate of a Kilgore Trout--that he regretted having written it at all. Because unlike Puzo Roth did face the kind of scrutiny that comes with being taken seriously by critics, which in respects got only worse with the years, certainly where the issue of gender was concerned (Roth, and Roth's stature, enduring into the age of political correctness, wokeness, #MeToo, with all that implied for his experience). Because in contrast with a Puzo that everyone knew was not Corleone a good many people identify both Roth the writer and Roth the man with Portnoy, with all that meant for how disapproval of the fiction interacted with disapproval of the man (which really didn't help during Roth's far from private or amicable divorce from Claire Bloom, or any other time)--with the extent to which Roth's work, in spite of his ceaseless protestations, really has been autobiographical making him more sensitive about that. And, I suspect, because just getting older and more conservative and more respectability-minded as so many do, all as Roth penned many a critically acclaimed, major prize-winning book afterward that sit far better with respectable opinion, he would seem to have preferred people think of him as the writer of American Pastoral rather than the writer of Portnoy's Complaint, while believing that his later career could have happened as it did without that long-ago hit. Alas, everything I have ever seen of the reality of writers' careers leaves me very doubtful of that--all as I suspect that in spite of his gripes about the flak that he caught over that novel from his youth an author as intelligent and inward-looking as Roth must have known better.
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