‘None Other’: The Subject of Roth’s My Life as a Man

Abstract

Imagine a reader reading, for the first time, Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man. She, let us say, dimly remembers reading the infamous and shocking Portnoy’s Complaint as an undergraduate, but now recalls little of the novel with the exception of the hero’s repulsive sexuality and a bizarre female character bearing the nickname of ‘The Monkey’. More recently, she has read The Ghost Writer and, enjoying the seeming lightness and brevity of that novel, has started Zuckerman Unbound. But she soon tires of Zuckerman and his exploits, so she stops reading the second instalment of the ‘Zuckerman Trilogy’ somewhere in the novel’s first third, and gives up reading Philip Roth for the moment. Then, in a bookstore, she sees that several of Roth’s novels have been reissued in attractive paperbacks by Penguin Books; she sees one entitled My Life as a Man bearing on the cover the interesting illustration of a hand holding a knife. Ignoring the usual and (to her mind) meaningless panegyrics on the back cover, she makes the assumption, given the name and title on the front cover, that this is Roth’s autobiography, a confession from (now she remembers Portnoy more fully) a parodist of confessions. She buys; she reads.