Pop Psychology
Pop psychology is that brand of the discipline that requires no degree and of which we are all guilty of engaging. It is the tendency to think we know more than we think we know about how the human mind works. And since none of us really do, it is a collective unifying tendency that has developed its own metaphors over time:
“Even a monster has to be from somewhere—even a monster needs parents. But parents don't need monsters.”
Character Description
This is a big book filled with robust characters. So you can bet a writer with the experience of Roth knows full well the intense value of the metaphorical image, especially the simile, for the purpose of conveying much about characters using efficient language:
“Not a kid anymore. A woman. But grotesquely fixed in her position. Behaves like a mechanism of human parts, like a loudspeaker, human parts assembled as a loudspeaker designed to produce shattering sound, a sound that is disruptive and maddening.”
A Lack of Character, Described
In addition to using metaphorical language coming in handy as shorthand for character description, it can be used to convey something more difficult: a lack of character. At least in the hands of a writer like Roth, that is:
“What he has instead of a being, I thought, is blandness- the guy's radiant with it. He has devised for himself and incognito, and the incognito has become him.”
The Immigrant Experience
As the title may indicate, the book is about the Jewish-American immigrant experience. And one of Roth’s most perfectly constructed extended metaphors in any of his books, he metaphorically captures multi-generation dream of that experience in one single sentence:
“As a family they still flew the flight of the immigrant rocket, the upward, unbroken immigrant trajectory from slave-driven great-grandfather to self-driven grandfather to self-confident, accomplished, independent father to the highest high flier of them all, the fourth-generation child for whom America was to be heaven itself."
The Man of Mystery
There is a man of mystery in the novel. The narrator, Nathan Zuckerman—Roth’s multi-novel fictional stand-in—has great trouble figuring him out which is something to say because Zuckerman spends a great deal of time in a great many books trying to figure out others:
“Rooting around trying to figure this guy out is ridiculous, I told myself. This is the jar you cannot open. This guy cannot be cracked by thinking. That's the mystery of his mystery. It's like trying to get something out of Michelangelo's David.”
