Robert M. (shotokanchef) reviewed on 10/13/2009 + 813 more book reviews

He's baaaack! In a switch from his recent narratives of post middle age misfits, Roth zeros in on a Jewish youth who will never reach maturity, but in many ways gets just as screwed up. He is reared in the environs of his father's kosher butcher shop, where is learns the trade from the slaughterhouse to the sales counter: just the start of his troubles. Amid the chaos of the Korean War, he escapes by matriculating to college in, of all places, Winesburg, Ohio: but not quite that of Sherwood Anderson. Try as he might to lead a quiet academic life he is surrounded by misfits who eventually cause his dismissal and enrollment in the Army. As in most of his novels Roth dwells over and over on sexual innuendo and in particular one pleasurable pastime that, if you believe him, seems to be foremost in the minds of those of his persuasion. Too, he continues to prove the Cole Porter lines from âAnything Goesâ that âGood authors too who once knew better words, now only use four letter words writing prose.â His favorite, a rather unique vernacular word that dubs as a verb, noun, adjective, adverb, and participle, has become as common in use as âain't.â The other, derived closely from its Latin root, is probably considered to be the crudest in the English language. And oh, did I mention that I now feel nearly qualified to be a kosher butcher? He dives into this trade so frequently and with such detail that I might have been reading âMoby Dickâ and learning the art of whale hunting. His hero, you ask? Well he ends up much like the chickens in the slaughterhouse, although not kosher. But there is yet a story intermingled with all of this and I still enjoy reading his novels; I devoured this one in an afternoon. With another hitting the bookstores as I finished I wonder, âIs Zuckerman really finished?â

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