Making It

Famous throughout the school for her altogether outspoken snobbery, which stopped short by only a hair, and sometimes did not stop short at all, of an old-fashioned kind of patrician anti-Semitism...

... What would she do with me, what would become of me if I persisted out of stubbornness and perversity in the disgusting ways they had taught me at home and on the streets?

...

Good manners to Mrs. K. meant only one thing: conformity to a highly stylized set of surface habits…

...

The “crude” behavior of my own parents, for example, was then and is still marked by a tactfulness and a delicacy that Mrs. K. simply could not have approached.

...

...those B students who rarely said anything in class but who underwent such evident agonies over the unseemly displays of pushiness they had to endure from the likes of me; the homosexuals with their supercilious disdain of my lower-class style of dress and my brash and impudent manner; and the prissily bred middle-class Jews who thought me insufferably crude.

написана книжка с юношеским задором если не сказать задиристостью

ex libris

Making It by Norman Podhoretz (up to pg 45) as quoted here and here and here

also interesting Commentary still can’t forgive Philip Roth. which says among other things

Not that a novelist needs either marriage or children to be great: Jane Austen and Flannery O’Connor, both better writers than Roth, died unmarried and childless.

коллекция ссылок:

. Podhoretz on Trump
. Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance
. Lindemann's review of Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends
. Книга, оскандалившая нью-йоркских интеллектуалов

и исключительно злобная статья в The New Republic Norman Podhoretz’s War on the Haters and the Losers - в самом начале сравнивают нашего героя с де Голлем And since Podhoretz remains feisty and self-obsessed as ever at the age of 87, he might yet overmaster de Gaulle in the field of self-celebration. там много смешного. и убедительного, в частности - про “brutal bargain”. и необыкновенной наглости фраза из Making It!

“Some day, perhaps, the Negroes would disappear through wholesale miscegenation into the white population; it would be the best conclusion to the whole sorry mess.”