Roth's women

[Ghetta Life]

I think you've captured the point well.  There is a definite level of 
anxiety in his male characters toward their female lovers.  And if the women 
are sometimes mean, it's partly because the men are indecisive or uncertain 
how to proceed in the relationship...  And in Humbolt's gift there is also a 
certain level of sexuality (along with danger and violence) under the 
surface between the male characters.

Ghetta

>From: "Andrew Pollock" <ahpollock at gmail.com>
>
>  The charge of misogyny is a perennial one against Roth, and there is 
>certainly some basis for it.  I've always thought, though, that it's one of 
>the things that actually contributes to Roth being a great writer.  The 
>level of anxiety about women, the struggle to figure out how the hell to 
>treat them, what to write about them, not only does this seem to motivate 
>an awful lot of his work, it makes of the books something more than they 
>would otherwise be.  I don't think Roth is a isogynist like Dostoevsky was 
>an anti-Semite, Roth also loves women; he has the complex relationship with 
>women as objects of desire that many men of his generation did, and he is 
>much more eloquent about the ambivalence of the position that he's in then 
>most are.  I guess my point is that not
>everything is under the author's control (although TP's paranoia tries to 
>undo that truism), and to the extent that Roth's complicated and sometimes 
>hateful relationship with women exceeds his control he books are more 
>interesting and better portrayals of his time.

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