Make It New

By Melvin Maddocks

MY LIFE AS A MAN by PHILIP ROTH 330 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

$8.95.

Now in his 41st year, Philip Roth still seems the most promising young novelist in America. With seven books behind him since Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award 15 years ago, he continues to apply to each succeeding title the thrust of a brilliant newcomer, as if staking out his subject and defining his voice for the first time.

The Roth determination not to repeat himself is becoming, in fact, his most famous and only predictable trait. The writer who went from Portnoy's Complaint to political satire (Our Gang), and thence to Kafkaesque fantasy (The Breast) is now so impatient that he cannot even wait to complete this book before trying to reconstruct himself. In My Life as a Man, he switches persona in mid-volume. The result is superb as a performance and uneven as a book (or rather, two books). It leads, finally, to some questions. Does a kind of bravura restlessness now not only characterize Roth but constitute the heart of his talent? Has his own range of style--an actor's gift, a writer's curse--got the better of him?

Like Roth, Peter Tarnopol, the narrator of his main story, is a hater of patterns, above all the repetitions of success. "The golden boy of American literature" at 26, Tarnopol has "a boundless belief in my ability to win." Why not? He has "never before been defeated." Graduated summa cum laude from Brown after a triumphant Yonkers boyhood, he manages to convert Army service in Germany into a prizewinning novel, A Jewish Father.

The flaw in Tarnopol is that as a book boy, he has "fallen in love with those complicated fictions of moral anguish" he keeps reading about. The depths of tragedy--that, Tarnopol thinks, is what an artist and a man must plumb. He yearns romantically to be a golden loser as well as a golden winner. Furthermore, he has a notion that one must prove one's manhood, not on the battlefields of war (like old-style machismo novelists) but in the combat zones of love. Nor is he fantasizing sexual conquest. For, paradoxically, what woman represents to Tarnopol is "the testing ground, not for potency, but virtue." (Like "keeping his word and doing his duty," he took it for granted that "his mission in life was to be faithful.")

In search of the woman worthy of his heroic self-sacrifice, Tarnopol throws aside such winners, such female Tarnopols, as Dina Dornbusch (Sarah Lawrence, "rich, pretty, smart, sexy, adoring") on the way to his perfect losing cause. Maureen Johnson is a twice-divorced ex-barmaid out of Elmira, N.Y., afflicted by artiness, more than a touch of paranoia and a very odd walk. Roth often seems as baffled as the reader as to why Tarnopol should marry this "cornball Clytemnestra" for whom he feels no affection or even lust. Does Maureen represent the muse of disorder, the Dionysian element every artist suspects he needs? Or is she a case of purest masochism--the general contention of Dr. Spielvogel, Tarnopol's analyst, a literary referral from Portnoy?

In a self-circling frenzy, both funny and bitter, Roth goes on and on explaining, until at last the book seems to have spun out from under him. The author's alter ego, Tarnopol, is allowed to create his own alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, and in a Doppelgaenger novel-within-a-novel, Zuckerman takes 95 pages to unfold a parallel plot about still another Jewish boy-novelist and his Gentile harpy-muse.

What a fixated center there is to Roth's tormented scrambling! The letters that Roth-Tarnopol-Zuckerman scribble may appear to free-associate like a Lenny Bruce monologue. The literary-psychoanalytical-theologi cal commentaries may come on like a marvelously clever cram course in 20th Century Anxiety. (Reader, look to your guilt-edged paperbacks: Dostoevsky, Freud, Kierkegaard.) But everything comes back to the unanswerable mys tery which seems to make all of life un answerable: why does a man embrace what he hates -- perversely bond himself to what destroys him? Is this, Roth appears to be asking, a paradox of life or the straight story on death?

Even when the monstrous Maureen dies, Tarnopol cannot let go of this wom an who never let go of him. A year after her death, three years after their sep aration, he is still writing of nothing but this formidable "testing ground" of womanhood, who not only blocks him off from other women but from other themes. "Just think," he tells himself, "of all there is to write about in this world that is not Maureen."

For his next novel, alas, Roth will think of something. Like Tarnopol, he may be looking for his own Maureen, the one subject that might slow down his dazzling technique, sober up his dou ble and triple ironies, humble his sheer knowingness. The one subject, in other words, that might turn him into a matured -- or at least middle-aged -- novel ist. In the meantime, unlike Tarnopol, he still can't lose for winning. That, for the moment, is his special talent and his special doom.

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