Up Society's Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth

by Mark Shechner

Overview

"Up Society's Ass Copper: Rereading Philip Roth is the culmination of thirty years of writing about Roth. A collection of essays and reviews, fulminations and daydreams, hasty claims and later retractions, it combines vivid first impressions with conclusions that have been percolating for decades. Its alloy of hunches, impressions, and judgments is the record of a restless and sometimes impatient reader trying to make sense of a turbulent and mercurial writer. I try to get at bedrock issues in Roth's writing without letting those issues distract me from the detours, anecdotes, impersonations, punch lines, send ups, pratfalls, visions, mutterings, and trash talk that are the purest distillations of Roth's art. Its working premise is that Roth "does what he does because he does what he does" and that the surest way to get a handle on him is not to be insistent and to allow each book to be unique, surprising, and strange."—Mark Shechner

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299193546
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	08/08/2003
Edition description:	1
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Mark Shechner is professor of English at the State University of New York-Buffalo and was twice a Fulbright lecturer on American literature. He is the regular fiction reviewer for the Buffalo News and is author of several books, including The Conversion of Jews and Other Essays.

Editorial Reviews

Borrowing a line from Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint for the title of his book, Shechner (English, SUNY at Buffalo) brings together 30 years of writing about the restless writer. Consisting mostly of reworked essays and reviews covering Roth's work up to his last novella, The Dying Animal, Shechner insists that the book cannot "reflect a single intention" or be "something more integrated, complete, or thematically consistent" because it was written in "bits and pieces" over the course of his career. But this does not make the collection any less pleasurable to read. Whether or not one agrees with Shechner's premise-which actually echoes a line from the retired Mossad agent in Operation Shylock-that "Roth does what he does because he does what he does," breezing through his myriad musings and retractions feels like being a part of a lively graduate seminar. The only drawback is that the book doesn't offer a new historical, psychoanalytical, or feminist perspective. Shechner simply writes about whatever he wants, not limiting himself to writing a critical study about, for example, Philip Roth and the Holocaust. Librarians should also note that parts of this book originally appeared in somewhat different form in the author's two previous titles, After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish-American Imagination and The Conversion of the Jews and Other Essays. A useful addition to most literature collections.-William D. Walsh, Georgia State Univ., Atlanta Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"Up Society's Ass, Copper presents the Roth aficionado with a series of original, provocative and entertaining perspectives—Shechner's very own—thus far unavailable in book form."—Sanford Pinsker, author of The Comedy that "Hoits": An Essay on the Fiction of Philip Roth


"Up Society's Ass Copper: Rereading Philip Roth is the culmination of thirty years of writing about Roth. A collection of essays and reviews, fulminations and daydreams, hasty claims and later retractions, it combines vivid first impressions with conclusions that have been percolating for decades. Its alloy of hunches, impressions, and judgments is the record of a restless and sometimes impatient reader trying to make sense of a turbulent and mercurial writer. I try to get at bedrock issues in Roth's writing without letting those issues distract me from the detours, anecdotes, impersonations, punch lines, send ups, pratfalls, visions, mutterings, and trash talk that are the purest distillations of Roth's art. Its working premise is that Roth "does what he does because he does what he does" and that the surest way to get a handle on him is not to be insistent and to allow each book to be unique, surprising, and strange."—Mark Shechner

From the Publisher