Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Over 21 years, eight novels and 2,200 pages, the titan of American writing has published the most ambitious literary series of our time.
Mar 26, 2002 | The decision to make a sequel is almost always a business decision. Though spinoffs may be good for the bank account, they're usually bad for art. The general rule is that with each new installment the overall quality drops (think "Meatballs III," "Lethal Weapon 4," "Rocky V"). Serious artists don't work on the installment plan.
But don't tell this to Philip Roth.
Over the past 21 years the 68-year-old novelist has published the most ambitious literary series of our time: the Nathan Zuckerman books. Taken together, these eight interlocking volumes -- a trilogy and epilogue ("Zuckerman Bound"), a stand-alone novel ("The Counterlife") and a second trilogy ("American Pastoral," "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain") -- form an awe- if not envy-inspiring masterpiece. Who knew that authors could still write on such a Proustian scale? The Zuckerman oeuvre weighs in at 2,215 clothbound pages, not counting Nathan's letter to Roth in the author's autobiography ("The Facts").
The hubris! The chutzpah! The word count! Who but Roth would dare pen eight books featuring a single embattled novelist -- "a being," as he writes in "The Facts," "whose existence was comparable to my own and yet registered a more powerful valence, a life more highly charged and entertaining than my own"?
Of course, neither Roth nor Zuckerman is a universally beloved character. Many readers have criticized them both for being narrow, misogynistic, self-involved and self-loathing. And while Roth's fictional Song of Self was too much for some people, he seemed, for a long time, incapable of writing any other way. "One's song isn't a skin to be shed -- it's inescapable, one's body and blood," he once wrote. "You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that's at once your invention and the invention of you."
The Zuckermania begins with the brick-thick "Zuckerman Bound." This book, which combines the early Zuckerman novels ("The Ghost Writer," "Zuckerman Unbound," "The Anatomy Lesson") and a novella ("The Prague Orgy"), covers events from 1956 to 1976, with the odd flashback to Nathan's Newark childhood. It engages us not just because of Roth's formidable intelligence and humor but because Zuckerman's themes -- the familial ambivalence, Nathan's women problems, the difficulties caused by autobiographical fiction -- intensify as we page through the stout volume.
The genius of the first four Zuckerman books is their recursive nature; they illustrate in vivid detail that the child is the father of the novelist, and that analysis is always interminable. We're shown the origin of every twitch of Zuckerman's psyche. For instance, when the 30ish Nathan explains to his mother about his third divorce -- "I just don't have the aptitude for a binding, sentimental attachment to one woman for life" -- we remember how the unmarried Nathan cheated on his girlfriend Betsy when he was 23. (He recalls struggling to undress this second lover, while she, "not resisting all that strenuously ... told me what a bastard I was to be doing this to Betsy.") We also recall what Nathan's mentor, the short-story writer E.I. Lonoff, told him in "The Ghost Writer": "You don't chuck a woman out after thirty-five years because you'd prefer to see a new face over your fruit juice."
Father figures like Lonoff abound in "Zuckerman Unbound." Usually Nathan is out to win their approval, but sometimes he squares off with them in Oedipal battle. Consider Milton Appel, a literary critic who tears into Nathan's work in print and then asks him to write an Op-Ed piece in support of Israel for the New York Times. This prompts Zuckerman, who worshipped Appel when he was young -- and who, in "The Anatomy Lesson," suffers from an undiagnosable pain -- to pick up the phone and shout (at the top of his doped-up voice):
"Milton Appel, the Charles Atlas of Goodness! Oh, the comforts of that difficult role! And how you play it! Even a mask of modesty to throw us dodos off the track! I'm 'fashionable,' you're for the ages. I fuck around, you think. My shitty books are cast in concrete, you make judicious reappraisals. Oh, I'll tell you your calling -- President of the Rabbinical Society for the Suppression of Literature in the Interest of Loftier Values. Minister of the Official Style for Jewish Books Other than the Manual of Circumcision. Regulation number one: Do not mention your cock. You dumb prick!"
Even when he's not drugged to the gills, Nathan's indecorous honesty and novelistic ruthlessness cause him to alienate just about everyone. Things get so bad that his podiatrist father calls him a "bastard" on his deathbed (instead of offering Dr. Zuckerman a loving goodbye, Nathan lectures him on the Big Bang). This leads his brother Henry to accuse him of murdering the old man by publishing his "Portnoy"-esque novel, "Carnovsky":
"Do you really think you can just go have a good time with the rest of the swingers without troubling yourself about your conscience? Without troubling about anything but seeing how funny you can be about the people who loved you most in the world? The origin of the universe! Oh, you miserable bastard, don't you tell me about fathers and sons! I have a son! I know what it is to love a son, and you don't, you selfish bastard, and you never will!"
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