Comments: However, here’s a list of the world’s ten best selling English language authors.
Agatha Christie – English
William Shakespeare – English
Barbara Cartland – English
Danielle Steel – Half Jewish Half Portuguese
Harold Robbins – Jewish
Sidney Sheldon – Jewish
Enid Blyton – English
J. K. Rowling – English, minor French ancestry
Dr. Suess – German American
Gilbert Patten – English American
So 2.5 of the top 10 indicates a lot of ability to write what the public wants to buy. Also on the list are #11 Jackie Collins (half Jewish/half English), #13 R.L. Stine (Midwestern Jewish), #23 Stan and Jan Berenstain (Jewish-American husband and English-American wife, raised their children Jewish).
* Never understood the appeal of this author. Portnoy’s Complaint is just about an extremely whiny, nebbishy Jewish guy who masterbates too much and drones on forever about his psychological complexes.
* Unfortunately, that does explain his “appeal.” Jews control a large portion of the Megaphone, and did even back when Roth was starting out. Roth’s works appealed to them, as he was a “voice” of Jewish-Americans of that period. They thus promoted the turd out of him, and shoved him down the throats of others until he became a standard contemporary “great” author.
As Steve explained, this is rather similar to how The Graduate became a hit: Jews in New York and LA kept going to screenings, keeping it theaters, until gradually it was talked up to goys and became a hit, although the Jewishness, as Steve has noted, was downplayed to goys, and the “Generation Gap”/Baby Boomer aspects were uptalked.
The quite open Freudian nature of Portnoy’s Complaint makes it rather laughable to anyone not in the Freudian cult, and hence it hasn’t aged well. However, the Jewish obsession with sex, assimilation, their mothers, and shiksa women remains, so many young Jews can still pick it up and be enthralled by how much he “gets” them.
Much of Roth’s work is really insular to Jews, and it’s rather funny to think of him as anything other than a niche author. I was forced to read Goodbye, Columbus in high school and couldn’t find a bit of it to relate to. I realize why now: Roth’s work doesn’t even attempt to explain to outsiders the assimilation-with-American-goys Jews were obsessed with, and merely assumes you know what he’s talking about as he writes. Since that’s the major theme and metaphor of the book, it doesn’t resonate with non-Jews.
Reading Goodbye, Columbus was rather like reading a story about space travel where it’s assumed you know all the mathematics and physics and historical theories behind launching a rocket and is really obsessed with faster escape velocity theories in detail; it’s going to go over the heads of most readers unless you skillfully get them up to speed.
Broadly, if you’re ever puzzled why certain artists are extolled despite rather mundane outputs and low popularity, check if the reviewers extolling the artists share some sort of personal/ethnic connection with the artist. This rather explains why a lowly-rated, badly-written show like Girls got so much press: lots of ugly twenty-something and thirty-something Jewish American female critics living or from Brooklyn liked Lena Dunham’s depiction of fat, ugly Jewish broad having meaningless sex in Brooklyn.
* I have to laugh at whoever said Jews aren’t good at writing fiction. They punch so far above their weight that it’s not funny. Heller, Bellow, Roth, Salinger, Potok, Wiesel. Popular writers like Asimov, Ephron, Sendak, and Maria Doria Russell. Name me a genre and I can find you a zillion successful writers.
Compare their output to Mormons, and see what you get.
* You could also throw in highbrows like Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer and Paul Auster if you like, plus more popular writers like William Goldman, Ira Levin, Leon Uris, Herman Wouk, and Irwin Shaw. In science fiction I particularly liked Alfred Bester, but there are loads of others. Lots of great children’s books, too; The Giving Tree is a heartbreaker.
* I would add to this, the case of Lenny Bruce. I never understood his status until I understood how Jews regard themselves vis-a-via the goyim. Watch videos of Bruce. He wasn’t funny, not in the way, say, similar lefty Jewish comics of the era were–e.g. Mort Sahl, Jackie Mason. What he was, was a Jewish martyr. What Jews (and their subordinate goys who mimic them) love about him is his subversiveness. To paraphrase Malcolm X, telling the WASP, and his Institutions, to his face just what he thinks of him and his hypocritical 1950s American values. This made him a hero to similarly adverse, highly self-identified Jews like Woody Allen and Howard Stern. Norman Mailer whose writing I do admire, was similar. He sent a copy of The White Negro to William Faulkner and Faulkner told him he needed to see a psychiatrist. Not coincidentally, Bruce, Mailer, Stern and Allen were all sexual degenerates very much into degrading the shiksa!
* “Goodbye, Columbus” makes a lot more sense if you read it as someone who throws away a relationship with a beautiful woman from a prosperous family–a family that welcomes him, instead of rejecting him as an outsider–because it wouldn’t allow him to feel like a victim anymore.
See the movie. Ali MacGraw’s Brenda may be spoiled, but she genuinely cares about him and he could influence her if he took the trouble. What he’s really afraid of is that HE will be the one to be influenced and assimilated.
