Older Writers Revisiting Their Younger Selves

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The Eastwick that the witches remember is gone. The mansion where they held their unholy revels has been cut up into condos. And they have been transformed too: Time has stripped them of the hotness that was once the source of their power. The bodies that gave them such glorious satanic leverage over the world are now dragging them down. One wonders whether anybody has ever described the small physical indignities of the aging process with as much tenderness and good humor as Updike. "Energy," Jane says. "I can't remember what it was like to have any. The thought of opening the microwave sickens me."

The question that Updike the Elder is putting to his younger self in Widows is this: Once the sex is gone, where does the power come from? ("Everybody needs power," Alexandra tells her daughter. "Otherwise the world eats you up.") Updike has spent his entire career writing about characters who are animated almost solely by the engine of Eros. Now the witches' sex lives are over, but their lives aren't, and you sense Updike's twinkly eyes peering cautiously into the darkness, beyond the glow of the merely fleshly, trying to make out what the world beyond might look like. Widows is in that sense an epitaph for the Me generation. For the first time in their lives, the witches must find other things to love and new, more durable ways to love them.

The Death of Portnoy

The first thing to say about Roth's Indignation is that it's a terrible book. The Roth who wrote Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 was a ranting, sulfurously brilliant stylist whose paragraphs were so full of energy and intelligence gone feral with self-loathing that they practically tore themselves apart on the page. This was a writer who showed us his adolescent hero sinning carnally with a hunk of raw liver that his unsuspecting family ate for dinner later that day.

That Roth is gone. This isn't even the lyrical late Roth of American Pastoral. Indignation is the work of the late-late Roth, the Roth of bitter, bitten-off miniatures like Everyman and Exit Ghost: curt, tetchy, unhumorous. But this post-Roth Roth does have something to say to the Roth who wrote Portnoy 40 years ago.

Portnoy (one always wants to type Porn-toy) was born, like Roth, in 1933; Marcus Messner, the hero of Indignation, is a year older. Like Portnoy, Marcus comes from a smotheringly protective Jewish family in Newark, N.J. ("You are a boy with a magnificent future ahead of you," Marcus' father tells him. "How do I know you're not going to places where you can get yourself killed?") Like Portnoy, Marcus escapes to college in Ohio, where he is baffled and inflamed by the attentions of a sexually unfettered shiksa. Unlike Portnoy, Indignation is a weird, flawed little book, full of undigested dialogue and cut-and-paste philosophy (including a 10-page argument about Bertrand Russell that culminates in a fit of vomiting). It's half fantasy and half tantrum.

There is one thing, however, that works in Indignation. Like Updike, Roth could be said to belong to the literary Me generation: writers (Norman Mailer was another) who traffic in thinly veiled alter egos, whose own internal dramas are their primary source of material. David Foster Wallace called them the Great White Narcissists, and it's true: Portnoy's awareness of the world around him more or less stopped at the end of his erect penis.