True Confessions in "Operation Shylock"

Although Operation Shyhck is one of Roth's most radical experiments in narrative form, this essay argues that its postmodernist aesthetics should not be taken at face value. A "pincers strategy" is employed to analyze key facts of Roth's life in light of the truths that Roth reveals about his inner world through his fictional veils. Establishing that Roth, like Portnoy, was in reality locked out of his apartment as a boy by his mother allows this memory—which recurs in Operation Shyhck—to be used as an "Archimedean point" to pry Roth's fictional world loose from its axis of self-referentiality. In the tripartite structure of author, "real," and "fake" Philip Roth's, it is the character at two removes who unlocks the door to the deepest traumas of Roth's childhood.