Introduce my to your friend Phillip Roth

misogynistic misanthrope he might be, but i can't help but love him. portnoy's complaint and goodbye columbus are utterly classic. since you liked the prague orgy, you should also check out the ghost writer and zuckerman bound which deal with the same character - roth's fictional alter ego, more or less. the human stain and the anatomy lesson both feature zuckerman, as well. i'm about to start the former.

my fav zuckerman is the metafictional magic of The Counterlife, and American Pastoral is great in a big-funny-riff-on-updike sorta way.

I read The Human Stain and didn't particularly like it - in that novel, at least, he couldn't characterise women for shit, and it all seemed a bit, well, whiny. Is THS particularly representative of hiw writing as a whole? I really like the idea of The Counterlife, but if it's written in the same style as THS I know I'll dislike it.

Sabbath's Theater is fucked up. I stopped reading after the scene in which the protagonist beats off on his dead shiksa lover's grave--and then is surprised by one of her other lovers who shows up to do the same thing.

I enjoyed Portnoy's Complaint and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Operation Shylock. I can't recall an author so thoroughly and neurotically obsessed with sex and Jewishness, and I have absolutely no doubt that Roth is a complete asshole in real life. But I'm sure I'll read more of him some time.

He was married to Claire Bloom, right? Didn't he write a horribly nasty book about her and publish it right before they were divorced (like, the publishing of the book was her notice that he wanted a divorce)? Or am I confusing him with someone else?

yes, that's him. the book you're thinking of is i married a communist. bloom, in turn, wrote a memoir that takes him to task for being a nasty, abusive asshole.

aw, hell, I don't think I bought that one. I went on a phillip roth splurge and got the human stain, operation shylock and the ghost writer.
is the book she wrote "Leaving a doll's House"?

yes, it is.
don't forget to read portnoy's complaint and goodbye columbus while you're at it!

Both The Counterlife and (particularly) Operation Shylock are the metafictional business.

In the novels subsequent to the latter his deviations from standard novelistic operating procedures are less foregrounded, given that form (from Sabbath's Theater on) presents itself as being directly dictated by the central characters' wills towards various kinds of power.

The necessity of being "an asshole" in the face of coercion towards being "harmless" seems to be fairly well established as his pet theme.

What's really interesting is how he uses the Zuckerman character as a middleman, to mediate the assholism - if Roth the novelist were really as scorched earth as his recent characters are, he'd be incapable of writing novels and would be restricted to polemics.

By the time of The Human Stain I think there is possibly too much polemicist partiality towards extended engagement with straw man arguments.

Sabbaths Theater was great, The Ghost Writer is a pretty good novella (maybe not a strict novella but pretty short for him)...that's all I've read

Loved Portnoy. And his later work has gone to a whole 'nother level: Shylock, Sabbath (I agree it's fucked up, but great) on out. And "American Pastoral" is pretty meta when you consider the bulk of the story is made up by Zuckerman.