Ever an accomplished mimic, Roth knew in 1960, when he first parodied him in print, that he could
imitate Richard Nixon's style and vocal mannerisms to humorous and satiric effect." But it was not
until 10 years later that he produced a full-length comic satire on the man, then in his first term as
president of the United States, and on the people surrounding him. As the subtitle indicates, Our
Gang, Starring Tricky and His Friends (1971) is, unlike Roth's other books, in the form of a playscript
or movie scenario, mostly in dialogue, with two chapters as dramatic monologues. It originated in the
pieces published in the New York Review of Books, which form the work's first two chapters.2
Subsequently Bantam Books published the book in paperback editions, including the “Watergate
Edition" (1973) and the "Pre-Impeachment Edition" (1974), each with a new preface by the author.
Like Roth's other books, Our Gang has been translated into many languages, but it is generally
regarded as a minor work, or one of Roth's “least significant" fictions (Rodgers, 107).
Roth's critics nevertheless concede that the book is often amusing and its satire sharp. As Dwight
MacDonald said in his New York Times review, Our Gang is “a political satire that I found far-fetched,
unfair, tasteless, disturbing, logical, coarse and very funny—I laughed out loud sixteen times and
giggled internally a statistically unverifiable amount. Of course, Dwight MacDonald, hardly a Nixon
lover, would. But his judgment, like his reactions, is apt: the book has all the strengths and
weaknesses he indicates. Moreover, MacDonald's later comparison to Swiftian satire, invited by
Roth's first epigraph from A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, is justified. Like his illustrious forebear,
Roth indulges in fantasies and distortions—often gross distortions, such as President “Dixon's"
attitude toward the My Lai massacre, or his skull sessions in football uniform—to drive home his
points. But unlike Swift, Roth uses a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel; subtlety is rare in Our
Gang. Then again, Roth was obviously outraged and angry, for those were outrageous and
infuriating times.
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In his own comments on the book Roth defends his brand of humor by linking it to the tradition of
American political satire as represented by James Russell Lowell's Biglow Papers and David Ross
Locke's “Nasby Letters," to H. L. Mencken's "Gamalielese," and to the broad comedy of Olsen and
Johnson, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and other slapstick comedians (RMAO, 44–47).
The “ferocity" of political satire in our earlier history, especially in the period before and after the Civil
War, is, he says, practically forgotten today, when scarcely any satiric writing exists, apart from
newspaper cartoons. As for decorum, that is precisely what Roth means to attack, or, rather, what
hides behind it: “All I'm saying, of course, is that the level of comedy in Our Gang isn't exactly what it
Page 1
Chapter 1
The Ironic And The Irate
Since 1959 Philip Roth has been publishing steadily, an average of a book every twenty-three months—all but three having something to say directly about Jews. The
cheers and the groans continue. While Roth has insisted he does not speak for American Jews or expound Judaism, he has given America a gallery of semitic
stereotypes. Sophie and Alexander Portnoy, 1 Brenda Patimkin, Eli the Fanatic, and Nathan Zuckerman are household names. Zuckerman, himself a novelist taken by
critics to be Roth's alter ego of the late seventies and eighties—to be the successor to Gabe Wallach, Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh, and Peter Tarnopol—spent
several novels protesting that he stood for nothing more than the power of art to illuminate life. From The Ghost Writer (1979)2 to The Counterlife (1987)3
Zuckerman kept declaring that his Jews were not the Jews and that his protagonists were not himself. He accused misreaders of willful self-impoverishment, of
reducing fiction to some petty biographic detective game. Only fiction, this fictitious character insisted, has the power to convey the many-sidedness of fact.
Misunderstood Zuckerman, making those pronouncements to get the world off his back but with few illusions about getting himself off his back, was succeeded in the
early nineties by a character bearing his author's name. Layered within Roth's fiction are authors and authors of authors, blurring the
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