DIED 2018
HOW DOES A JEWISH American Princess call her children for dinner? One of the many failed fiction projects of my life was an attempt to write the female answer to Portnoy’s Complaint, a book whose energy, humor, and outrageousness I found electrifying. I was in love with his writing from the minute I opened Goodbye, Columbus and Aunt Gladys says, Patimkin I don’t know and What, I should serve four different dinners? That diction! It was like the time I had coleslaw in a Jewish deli in Montreal and started weeping because it was the coleslaw of my childhood. But there was something else in the work that didn’t go down so easily. His women—do we call them love interests?—were so wildly sexualized I couldn’t recognize anyone I knew, myself included.
But what if I took it as a literary challenge, if I could turn it around and show men as they appeared to us? Let them be the inscrutable crazy-making objects for once! The father would have to be a superhuman figure like Mrs. Portnoy. The mother, hmmm, let’s give her an affair with the rabbi. Of course there would have to be a lot of masturbation; well, what can I say, pogroms are for everybody. That’s the punchline of a joke too terrible to explain. Wait, here’s an idea—I could start every chapter with a JAP joke!
Let’s leave me at my desk, writing this magnum opus in 1997, and flash back a few years. Driving to San Antonio to hear him read from Patrimony, my set of the $1.50 Bantam paperbacks beside me, dreaming of what I will say when we meet. Really, we are already family. During the Q&A, someone asks him how the changes in American mores over his long career have affected his work. Oh, he says, I think it’s my work that affected American mores. Still, after the reading, I shyly approach the podium, one other besotted fan racing me up there. Quickly, a handler steps between us—there will be no autographs.
So, no, I never got to speak to him. And I never finished that novel. Still, when I read and reread him, which I will for the rest of my life, even if he was a little arrogant and not very friendly, I still have to close the book every now and then in frustration at the size of his genius.
How does a Jewish American Princess call her children for dinner? Get in the car!