Books We Can't Quit: Zuckerman Bound, by Philip Roth

645 pgs, $35.00

Review by Jonathan Russell Clark

The opening sentence establishes everything:

“It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago––I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman––when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man.”

With this remarkable and deceptively simply sentence, Philip Roth introduced the world to his doppelganger, the writer Nathan Zuckerman. The year was 1979; the book, The Ghost Writer. But, as that sentence suggests, Zuckerman’s Bildungsroman would be massive, too big for one book. Since the publication of The Ghost Writer, Nathan Zuckerman has appeared in eight additional books. But the ones I want to focus on here are the first four: The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1984), and The Prague Orgy (1985), which are collectively known as Zuckerman Bound.

From my point of view, that opening sentence foreshadowed my own life. I, too, began my first stories in my early 20s. I, too, was already planning my own Bildungsroman. And I, too, was meeting a great man. This was one of my first Philip Roth novels and my first exposure to Nathan Zuckerman. And like Zuckerman, the narrative of The Ghost Writer changed my life. At the time, I was living in Boston, trying to find my voice, my style, that elusive element of creative work that compels you on and feels like home. I was struggling. What’s more, I was troubled by how much I thought about fiction, how everything I saw, heard and felt would immediately be turned into paragraphs in my head. I had a fictive filter, and it distracted me. A friend of mine was describing her breakup to me, and I listened more to glean interesting details––the specifics of their fights, the rhythm of her speech, the verbal mannerisms befitting such an emotionally vulnerable state––than I did for support. I was a horrible person. As soon as I finished The Ghost Writer, I immediately ran out to the nearest bookstore to purchase the next two novels in the series: Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson. In their pages, to my immense relief, I found passages like this:

Monstrous that all the world’s suffering is good to me inasmuch as it’s grist to my mill—that all I can do, when confronted with anyone’s story, is to wish to turn it into material, but if that’s the way one is possessed, that is the way one is possessed. There’s a demonic side to this business that the Nobel Prize committee doesn’t talk much about. It would be nice, particularly in the presence of the needy to have pure disinterested motives like everybody else, but, alas, that isn’t the job. The only patient being treated by the writer is himself.

It felt as if every other page contained a mirror, a revelation, a wake-up call-to-arms that was designed specifically for me. Suddenly, I understood that my preoccupation with transforming any stimuli I encountered into fiction wasn’t some indication of my lessening humanity; rather, it was a consequence of my chosen art. I considered how when I used to skateboard everyday, I saw the world as an obstacle to be skated. Passion transforms our minds, nesting inside of us and changing how we see the world. I wasn’t crazy. Or selfish. Or, maybe I was, but it was because I was a fiction writer.

What’s more––and this is a little embarrassing to admit––Zuckerman’s notoriety appealed to me. Here was a fiction writer who couldn’t walk the streets of New York without being recognized. In Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman’s recent novel Carnovsky (a stand-in for Roth’s infamous and controversial 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint) compels strangers to talk to him. In the opening scene, a “small, husky young fellow” confronts Nathan on a bus. “See this guy next to me?” the man says to the other passengers. “He’s the guy who wrote Carnovsky. Didn’t you read about it in the papers? He just made a million bucks and he’s taking a bus.”

Reading it again, I see now how exactly I’d misunderstood Roth’s intention. These novels are about, as the Modern Library edition of Zuckerman Bound has it, “the unforeseen consequences of art.” Zuckerman, like Roth, did not write his novel so that he could become notorious. He wrote it because he’s a writer. Yet the world seems to think that a book’s reception is from the very beginning deliberate. They think Zuckerman wants the attention. It isn’t cool to be a famous author the way Zuckerman is. It actually seems like a nightmare.

By The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman’s ready to give up the writing game in favor of the medical field. He’s in intense and inexplicable pain, which he begins to attribute to his work. A critic named Milton Appel publishes a lengthy essay appropriately titled “The Case of Nathan Zuckerman,” in which Appel describes “what an awful writer” Zuckerman is. Hardly anyone comes to his defense. Why go on writing in that kind of environment? Why publish if your work is only being met with analytical vitriol?

Then, in The Prague Orgy, Zuckerman is confronted with writers who have real problems. He meets a young writer from Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, who tells him that had he remained in his home country

I would have taken the way of resignation. I could not write, speak in public, I could not even see my friends without being taken in for interrogation. To try to do something, anything, is to endanger one’s own well-being, and the well-being of one’s wife and children and parents.

Zuckerman’s struggles––crazy fans, spiteful critics, ex-girlfriends, ex-wives, mysterious pain––suddenly appear as petty as they are. Well, not petty, exactly. But quotidian. Regular. In fact, compared to a country in which a poet prefers the insane asylum the government tosses him into because “there he has some peace and quiet and at last he writes,” Zuckerman’s problems seem like, well, not problems at all.

It would be easy to dismiss these books as self-aggrandizing, masturbatory screeds aimed at all of Roth’s enemies. One could write off Zuckerman as a selfish misogynist with few redeeming qualities. Maybe all of that’s true. But at least these books are honest, even about Zuckerman’s reprehensible traits. And for me, as I read these novels, I saw a lot of myself in Zuckerman, in Roth, maybe because I was young and naïve, maybe because there was truth in those pages. Probably a little bit of both. But something awakened in me when I read Zuckerman Bound, something real and vital and necessary––not for the world, not for anyone else but me. It was an important step in my development as a writer. Though that may not mean anything to the world, I think that, like Zuckerman, and by extension Roth, to me that it is the great aim of fiction––to find that one person who needs to hear those exact words at that exact moment, and transform them.

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Jonathan Russell Clark is a regular contributor to The Millions, and his essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming from The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Colorado Review, Chautauqua, Black Heart Magazine, Thrasher Magazine, Buffalo Almanack, Edge and DigBoston. He is currently at work on a novel. Follow him @jrc2666.