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Before you read the book:
I know that I recently posted a review on American Pastoral, so you might be getting tired of my posts on Roth (I’m sorry, but they won’t stop soon – he’s now got 29 books) but how could I, after converting to a full-fledged fan of Roth pass up the opportunity to review Indignation (2008) the week it came out? And could the title say anything about how Roth feels in today’s America? And here’s another text-only cover design by Milton Glaser, extending the Roth-Glaser relationship. The book itself is quite quaint and attractive, being about the same size as a trade paperback.
This books is not a novel – not by my standards anyway. It took me less time to read than it takes me for most short stories, and that’s partly because Roth’s prose is so smooth but mostly because the book is extremely short. Though it clocks in at around 230 pages, each pages is larger than usual print, larger than usual margins, and larger than usual spacing between lines. I’m not sure why it has been toted as a novel. That actually might lead to some disappointment because it is simply not deep enough to constitute a novel, especially not by Roth’s own standards.
I have to admit, I’ve been looking forward to this book, even though initial plot blurbs made it sound like many other Roth books: young Newark Jew who is trying to get out from under the tyranny of his father winds up getting into even more trouble. Indignation, though relatively slight, is much more than that.
Here we meet Marcus Messner, a nineteen-year-old Newark Jew who has always been a good kid. It’s 1951, and he’s just completing his first year at Robert Treat University in Newark. He’s loving it. The professors are invigorating. The ideas are flowing. He’s on track to become valedictorian. On the other side of the world, the Korean War is in full swing. Perhaps it’s because his son is now capable of going off to war and dying for his country that makes Marcus’s father become a bit more protective.
Whatever the cause or mix of causes fueling the abrupt change in his previously benign paternal behavior, he manifested his fear by hounding me day and night about my whereabouts. Where were you? Why weren’t you home? How do I know where you are when you go out? You are a boy with a magnificent future before you – how do I know you’re not going to places where you can get yourself killed?
After a night studying at the library, Marcus returns home to find the door locked. His father has ceased to trust his straight-A son and has locked him out of the house as a lesson to not go wandering off to whorehouses at night.
Unable to handle so much protection and distrust, Marcus flees Newark and winds up in Ohio’s Winesburg College, a place that could be even more cloistered and vigorously defensive of its standards. In an ugly twist of historic placing, Marcus is forced to accept all of these standards:
The strong desire to rush off to the bathroom was quelled by my fear that if I did so, I might get caught by a librarian or a teacher or even by an honorable student, be expelled from school, and wind up a rifleman in Korea.
But the pressure mounts. Marcus has altercations with a couple of his roommates. He finds himself suddenly involved in a tryst with an emotionally unstable girl. And underneath it is a bitter resentment of the system in place at Winesberg. He begins to skirt the line leading to expulsion, and even flaunts his unconventional beliefs to an impressed Dean who nonetheless must express his dissatisfaction with Marcus’s path:
“I admire your directness, your diction, your sentence structure – I admire your tenacity and the confidence with which you hold to everything you say. I admire your ability to memorize and retain abstruse reading matter even if I don’t necessarily admire whom and what you choose to read and the gullibility with which you take at face value rationalist blasphemies spouted by an immoralist of the ilk of Bertrand Russell, four times married, a blatant adulterer, an advocate of free love, a self-confessed socialist dismissed from his university position for his antiwar campaigning during the First War and imprisoned for that by the British authorities.”
“But what about the Nobel Prize!”
What makes all of this more interesting is the fact that we already know – and this is not a spoiler since you can find it in many of the reviews already published and in the first few pages of the book – that Marcus is dead, or perhaps on the fringe of death in a morphine-induced coma.
And even dead, as I am and have been for I don’t know how long, I try to reconstruct the mores that reigned over that campus and to recapitulate the troubled efforts to ellude those mores that fostered the series of mishaps ending in my death at the age of nineteen.
We even know how he dies, if we’re paying attention to the not-so-subtle clues. But we’re not sure how he gets there. And even that’s not fully the point. What we get is an interesting look at how history intrudes and overtakes, arbitrarily, a young, basically innocent boy. Rather than focusing on youth and social mores, then, Roth’s theme, as in the past few books, is centered on death and mortality. Unlike Everyman, however, here we see it from the perspective a boy with a bright future, not from an elderly man who has already lived a bitter life.
Unfortunately, I craved a bit of the festering bitterness. Marcus’s character might be indignant, but he’s not cynical yet. He’s a bit too immature to be fully bitter. Mostly he’s responding to emotions that flare up whenever someone attempts to give him direction, like many nineteen year olds. I’m not saying Roth failed to execute what he planned – indeed, Marcus’s voice was very convincingly innocent and unassuming and indignant - it’s just that I was not as interested in what Marcus had to say as I have been in some of Roth’s prior characters.
Still, while the title of the book come from the Chinese national anthem and the book takes place nearly 60 years ago, it was easy to associate both the title and the themes to America’s situation today. That’s a point that is never explicit, but anyone who walks into a book store and sees the title should make the association naturally, even if that person is not aghast when thinking about America’s plight. The book works very well on this level of analysis too.
Basically, I came away pleased but not to the same degree I have come to expect from Roth. He usually succeeds in delving much deeper and being much more nuanced. This book felt more like a quick project, a great exercise in masterful writing but that doesn’t quite live up to its thematic potential (like McEwan’s On Chesil Beach). Still, it’s tightly woven and compelling. I just wouldn’t recommend it to people for their first go with Roth.
Before you read the book:
I’m hooked. The more Roth I read the more I’m convinced he is the greatest American writer alive today (and there are several great ones). But Roth – Roth’s books are in another league. Freshly finished with The Prague Orgy (the last book in what Vintage calls “Zuckerman Bound containing The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and The Prague Orgy) I decided to not move on to his latest “Zuckerman” novel, Exit Ghost, published last year. Instead I chose to finally read Roth’s Pulitzer Prize winner: American Pastoral (1997). American Pastoral also – and I was so happy – includes one of my newest favorite literary characters of all time, Nathan Zuckerman, albeit in a different role.
While “Zuckerman Bound” and Exit Ghost are written about Nathan Zuckerman, American Pastoral is written by Nathan Zuckerman, creating what has to be one of the most sophisticated and effective framing devices in all of literature. The first section “Paradise Remembered” is Zuckerman’s reflection on how this book came about. It’s a beautiful introduction to the themes of the novel that are displayed and flayed and displayed again in a different light and then stripped down with stunning compassion which leads to chilling effects in the last two parts, “The Fall” and “Paradise Lost.”
Zuckerman has aged a little more than a decade since I last visited him (only a month ago) in The Prague Orgy. It’s his forty-fifth-year high school reunion. Events and encounters lead him to reflect on his youth and in particular on his boyhood hero: Seymour “the Swede” Levov. The Swede is among the generation of Jews who were finally able to take full advantage of what America offered; he is descended from immigrants who had nothing, from a second-generation Jewish family that started building up a foundation, and from a father who has built a successful glove making factory. His grandfather and then his father had to work hard, and now the Swede is set up for an easy life; he even takes on the physical features of an all-American boy. Zuckerman idolized the Swede. He was the perfect athlete who was raised to an even higher status since he was enacting these great athletic feats while the country engaged in World War II. As is usual with Roth (but he still surprises me with his ability), the narrative looks at the Swede’s status from many angles: as a blessing, as an insignificant fact, as a piece of nostalgia, and as a curse.
And it all began – this heroically idealistic maneuver, this strategic, strange spiritual desire to be a bulwark of duty and ethical obligation – because of the war, because of all the terrible uncertainties bred by the war, because of how strongly an emotional community whose beloved sons were dying far away facing death had been drawn to a lean and muscular, austere boy whose talent it was to be able to catch anything anybody threw anywhere near him. It all began for the Swede – as what doesn’t? – in a circumstantial absurdity.
Zuckerman has seen the Swede a few times since childhood, and he’s still struck with awe, still a little giddy. One day not long before the high school reunion Zuckerman receives a letter from the Swede asking him to meet him in a New York City restaurant. The Swede’s father has died, and the Swede actually wants Zuckerman to consider helping him write a piece about his father. While Zuckerman would never do such a thing for another person, he is too intrigued by the Swede to say no. Zuckerman hopes to get under the surface of this apparently perfect man who has lived an apparently ideal life.
Only . . . what did he do for subjectivity? What was the Swede’s subjectivity? There had to be a substratum, but its composition was unimaginable.
That was the second reason I answered his letter – the substratum. What sort of mental existence had been his? What, if anything, had ever threatened to destabalize the Swede’s trajectory?
Zuckerman, trying to see beneath the at once humble and complacent veneer, is disappointed. Turns out that at the dinner the Swede doesn’t even go into the piece he wants written about his father. They pass a dull evening together, and Zuckerman, in a sense, gets over the Swede. There is nothing going on under the surface. Unless . . .
Unless he was not a character with no character to reveal but a character with none that he wished to reveal – just a sensible man who understands that if you regard highly your privacy and the well-being of your loved ones, the last person to take into your confidence is a working novelist. Give the novelist, instead of your life story, the brazen refusal of the gorgeous smile, blast him with the stun gun of your prince-of-blandness smile, then polish off the zabaglione and get the hell back to Old Rimrock, New Jersey, where your life is your business and not his.
He knows nothing more about the Swede, however, until the high school reunion comes around. There he runs into the Swede’s younger brother, Jerry. Only a bit of information is passed from Jerry to Zuckerman, but it’s enough. A tidbit about the Swede’s daugher shows Zuckerman how wrong he was to pass off the Swede as just another superficial human being, too ideal to be interesting. As happens at large reunions, Jerry and Zuckerman are separated before Zuckerman can satisfy his curiosity any further.
Though Zuckerman has little to go on, he delves into writing a book about the Swede’s life, focusing on the period of the 1960s and Vietnam and the early 1970s with Watergate, when his daughter has most destabalized not only his life but the life of his wife, the neighbors, the community, and the United States. It is a fantastic, virtuosic plummet into the heart of America.
I can’t remember a book that caused a more visceral reaction to me. Roth does not pull punches and he is not shy about making the reader feel complicit. Because of this, I can’t say I’d recommend American Pastoral to everyone despite the fact that I consider it one of the greatest novels of the last century. It deserves to be looked at with an open mind and with an understanding that Roth is not putting anything in here for gratuitous effect, and the effect is often devestating. I swear, when the Swede encounters Rita Cohen to pass information to Merry I felt like I was there. My mouth went dry. Like the Swede, I too wanted to run out of the room I was in. I felt like the Swede, and I admired Roth even more for his ability to do that. Indeed, Roth, more than any other writer I know of, has the ability to pull me into the emotions the characters are feeling. I feel transported, like the Swede:
The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral – into the indigenous American berserk.
Another striking aspect of the novel is its treatment of Newark, a city I’m drawn to since I spent a summer working as a judicial intern in the Federal Court, which sits right in the area described in the novel, and I still frequent Newark’s streets. Roth, like Zuckerman and the Swede, grew up in Newark in a time when it had a better reputation. Here we get a gritty, up close shot of the city following the ugly and destructive riots of 1967; forty years later, these riots still affect the city and its abismal reputation. Over the past few years, Newark has been attempting to revitalize itself. It has a classy performing arts center and a brand new state-of-the-art stadium. The homicide rate is dropping, finally. But this scene is still familiar:
Along this forsaken street, as ominous now as any street in any ruined city in America, was a reptilian length of unguarded wall bareen even of graffiti. But for the wilted weeds that managed to jut forth in wiry clumps where the mortar was cracked and washed away, the viaduct wall was barren of everything except the affirmation of a weary industrial city’s prolonged and triumphant struggle to monumentalize its ugliness.
The book doesn’t dwell in the urban areas, though. The Swede has moved from Newark to the rural community of Old Rimrock. It’s a stark contrast: Newark is primarily inhabited by Democrats and immigrants, Jewish or Catholic; Old Rimrock is primarily Republican and inhabited by wealthy WASPs. The Swede’s generation was one of the first to change these stereotypes. With his Irish Catholic wife, the Swede moves thirty miles west of Newark, and allows Roth to explore yet another side of America.
I’ll admit that my proximity to the landscape has made me like this book more than I perhaps would have otherwise, as I suspect is the case with Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Still, American Pastoral is more layered than the clichéd onion. In many ways, that layering is the major motif in the novel: there are glove factories, face-lifts, paintings that look like they are trying to “rub out” the paint rather than apply it. We see it in the narrative structure which has a fictional author writing a fictional account about a real person. We see it in the way Roth plays with the layers of time. We see it in the layers of meaning in each and every scene. This is an intimate look at a family that spreads out into an astounding discussion of America and her history.
After you read the book:
The last sentence in my review states that this is a great discussion of America and her history. I’m very curious about how people not from America responded to this book. Was it accessible despite the multitude of historical references? My suspicion is that it is, that the book goes beyond America and touches on topics that are familiar to everyone. I’m not just talking about the interfamily relationships here; I’m talking about the backwards look at a century that promised a lot and looked quite pretty from the surface. But underneath . . .
I have heard from several people that they get bored with the last section. I can understand how that could happen. Instead of following Merry and Rita further into the berserk, Roth moves on to a small neighborly cookout on a holiday weekend. I found it fantastic, the perfect ending. After stripping the Swede’s emotions down to the raw core, Roth then proceeds to show everyone covering their pain up. Dawn is moving on by getting a facelife, a new house, and a new man. This is as much to cover the past as it is to build a better life. It’s a pleasant looking scene with friendly conversation going on between people who despise each other fundamentally. Brought to remembrance that great last scene in Woody Allen’s film against Ronald Reagan, Crimes and Misdemeanors, though American Pastoral was much less comical.
Before you read the book:
For the first time after reading one of Roth’s Zuckerman book, I don’t feel the uncontrollable urge to read the next one straight away. But wait! That’s not because The Prague Orgy (1985) tainted the aura or turned me off at all. On the contrary, I feel like this book was the perfect conclusion – or, rather, the perfect coda – to the previous three books: The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson. Even though it turned out to be a bit clumsy, it makes sense that Vintage put these four books together in one volume: Zuckerman Bound, a trilogy and epilogue. Together these books say profound things about literature and how literature seeps into everything – the author, the readers, the culture. Of course, I will still read Exit Ghost soon enough.
This Zuckerman book is stylistically different from the previous three. It is composed of a few days in Zuckerman’s notebook, in the first person. Also, it is quite a bit shorter at only 86 pages. These differences, however, don’t unbalance the series. Rather, these differences set up the shift in perspective that The Prague Orgy effects. This book is still concerned with writing and authorship and how it all affects society, but here the society is very very different, taking place in communist Prague.
The book begins with a short journal entry from New York City where Zuckerman is visited by two exiled artists from Prague: a writer, Zdenek Sisovsky, and his actress girlfriend, Eva. These two discuss how talented Zuckerman is, but underneath it all they express envy that he lives in a culture where he can express his art. In a way, despite his knowledge and his own demons, Zuckerman is still naïve about what literature can do to a society and to a person. Both Zdenek and Eva have a compelling history in which a communist regime has flattened their ability to speak through art, precisely because this regime knows of its true power. Eva provides a clever tie back to The Ghost Writer because she once played, to great acclaim, Anne Frank on stage in Prague. But recently her role, because of its associations, has served only to ostracize her from her own community.
“My dear Mr. Vice-Minister, my family was being persecuted as Protestants in Bohemia in the sixteenth century.” But this does not stop him – he knows this already. He says to her, “Tell me – why did you play the role of the Jewess Anne Frank on the stage when you were only nineteen years old?”
In exile now, it is not likely she will ever be able to act again, at least not with the kind of showcase she had. This also ties back to Zuckerman’s own plight which was the subject of the first three books.
“But everybody understands,” Eva explains to him, “. . . these are only roles. If half the country thinks I’m a Jew, that does not make it so.”
I got the sense, though, that Roth was showing another extreme here. What happened to Zuckerman during his development as a writer was important and deeply profound; however, what happened to him, though similar to what happened to Eva, happened for different reasons and on different scales.
Zdenek’s story serves as the impetus for the rest of the short novel. His father was killed when the Nazis occupied Prague. But before he was killed, he was a prolific writer in Yiddish, even though none of this work was published. This part reminded me of what I’ve recently learned about Imre Kertész, who never got any notice in his native Hungary when it was under a communist regime.
Even if he had published all two hundred of them, no one would have paid attention – not to that subject. But in America my father would have been a celebrated writer.
(not that Kertész has gotten a lot of notice in America . . . yet.)
Zuckerman is deeply interested in Zdenek’s dead father’s work, and he wants to go to Prague to retrieve the manuscripts so they can be published in America. The manuscript is being held by Zdenek’s disgruntled ex-wife in Prague. So there Zuckerman goes. In Prague, Zuckerman uncovers a different world where literature’s incredible power is ironically recognized – and therefore quashed.
I imagine Styron washing glasses in a Penn Station barroom, Susan Sontag wrapping buns at a Broadway bakery, Gore Vidal bicycling salamis to school lunchrooms in Queens – I look at the filthy floor and see myself sweeping it.
Someone stares at me from a nearby table while I continue sizing up the floor and with it the unforeseen consequences of art. I am remembering the actress Eva Kalinova and how they have used Anne Frank as a whip to driver her from the stage, how the ghost of the Jewish saint has returned to haunt her as a demon. Anne Frank as a curse and a stigma! No, there’s nothing that can’t be done to a book, no cause in which even the most innocent of all books cannot be enlisted, no only by them, but by you and me.
It would seem Zuckerman is doing literature a favor by getting the manuscript out. Indeed, Zuckerman’s motives seem pure, at first. In fact, because his motives are so high and noble, he does not fully concern himself with the strange artists (Zdenek’s wife among them) who talk and talk and talk but who don’t write. But what are his true motives? Is he really doing Zdenek’s father a favor? Is he advancing literature? Surprisingly substantial, this short coda to Zuckerman’s first three books is incredible how it recasts the whole series in a new light – as if it weren’t already intricately twisting and turning!
After you read the book:
I guess I knew from the get-go that Zuckerman had to fail. But I never really stopped to consider the implications of his failure. Here he is, a great writer, trying to advance the cause of literature (and Jews?) by saving a murdered? man’s Yiddish writings. But he fails. He can’t beat the system. Interestingly, there are parts of the novel that make one wonder if he should even be trying.
Before you read the book:
I know I said I was going to wait to read this book in an effort to prolong the pleasure I’m getting out of Roth’s Zuckerman books. But hey, there are still two more Zuckerman books to go after this one, let alone the books where Roth uses Zuckerman as a type of narrator rather than subject. I have more pleasure in store! The Anatomy Lesson (1983) follows The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound and I really wondered (with great anticipation) where Roth could go next. After all, these books are not simply books about the times and trials of a successful author. They are metafiction at its best, and how many different ways can one author using one character approach the art of writing? Plenty, apparently (and thankfully). The Anatomy Lesson is even more metafictional than the previous two novels which were less concerned with the actual writing process than with the artist’s development and isolation.
Here, Roth again enters the literary “hall of mirrors,” writing about Zuckerman (who both is and isn’t Roth) who is writing about Carnovsky (who both is and isn’t Zuckerman). And of course, though Roth has put himself on display, he playfully eludes biography. What we get instead is perhaps even more impressive: both a serious and comical look at art and its relationship to the artist, for better or for worse. Where the two preceeding novels were more or less straightforward in their approach to art and the artist, in The Anatomy Lesson Roth has pulled out all of the stops, twisting and turning those mirrors under all kinds of light to present a virtuosic show unlike any I’ve ever seen before. What really makes me make such a bold statement is the fact that throughout the book Roth maintains all of this complexity yet his prose is as limpid as can be.
The story picks up with Zuckerman just having turned forty, he’s in a lot of pain - ”a hot line of pain that ran forward behind his right ear into his neck, then branched downward beneath the scapula like a menorah held bottom side up” - and for the past several months he’s been looking for some relief. In another excellent opening line, Roth encapsulates much of what is to come: Zuckerman’s relationship with his mother, who is soon “gone,” and his relationship to the other women.
When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do. Zuckerman was making do with four other women.
Though these women do their best to assist Zuckerman, the pain is practically unbearable. The only time he is even slightly comfortable is when he is lying on his playmat (the locale for quite a bit of Rothian word play). To make matters worse, Zuckerman cannot write. Sure, part of the problem is the pain the physical act of writing creates, but Zuckerman can’t even come up with anything to write about because the pain consumes him. Oh, and to make matters even more worse, he’s going bald.
. . . vocationally obstructed, physically disabled, sexually mindless, intellectually intert, spiritually depressed – but not bald overnight, not that too.
At its roots The Anatomy Lesson is about this pain, which is both real and metaphoric. No physician has successfully diagnosed the pain; none has given Zuckerman any relief. The only relief Zuckerman can find is by varying doses of vodka, Percodan, and marijuana. Having so much pain for so long begs the question: what is the real source of this pain? Because Zuckerman is always trying to capture his experience, he comes up with many plausible sources. First and foremost:
Zuckerman was taking “pain” back to its root in poena, the Latin word for punishment: poena for the family portrait the whole country had assumed to be his, for the tastelessness tha thad affronted millions and the shamelessness that had enraged his tribe.
Early in the novel, Zuckerman’s mother dies. At the funeral Zuckerman’s brother, a dentist, gives a seventeen-page eulogy (more than Zuckerman has composed in months), and the eulogy achieves its effect, serving to set the record straight about the mother and Carnovsky’s mother and to sever the brothers’ relationship for good. Zuckerman sardonically thinks that his purpose in writing is now complete: he’s murdered his parents and become estranged from his brother – emancipation! Though on the surface Zuckerman speaks with mostly this type of derision, Roth won’t let his character be so quickly derided by readers. Roth complicates things, and makes the book so much more worthy to read, by allowing Zuckerman to show that underneath it all, he’s still lonely and scared and completely empty. Despite all of the “outward trappings of pleasure” all that results is pleasure’s opposite. And you’d think all of these mixed emotions would be a great place for a writer to find new material, but so far, nothing – only the temptation to end it all . . . or come close to it:
On the other hand, a failed suicide that didn’t completely cripple him might provide a new subject – more than could be said so far for success. But what if the pain vanished halfway down, went the way it came, leaped from his body as he sailed from the roof – what then? What if he saw in every salient detail a next book, a new start? Halfway down is probably just where that happens.
But the real pleasure in this book is the metafiction, this pain as an analogue to writing, Zuckerman’s physical decline and mental anguish (at least from the outside perspective) as an analogue to the irony of passing the threshold to becoming an artist:
If you were to watch some certified madman groaning over a table in his little cell, observe him trying to make something sensible out of qwertyuiop, asdfghjkl, and zxcvbnm, see him engrossed to the exclusion of all else by three such nonsensical words, you’d be appalled, you’d clutch his keeper’s arm and ask, “Is there nothing to be done? No anti-hallucinogen? No surgical procedure?” But before the keeper could even reply, “Nothing – it’s hopeless,” the lunatic would be up on his feet, out of his mind, and shrieking at you through the bars: “Stop this infernal interference! Stop this shouting in my ears! How do I complete my life’s great work with all these gaping visitors and their noise!”
And in The Anatomy Lesson, we readers get to reap the rewards of Zuckerman’s pain and isolation (or Roth’s).
From what I’ve said above, the following might come as a shock: I did not enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed The Ghost Writer or Zuckerman Unbound. The sheer pleasure of Roth’s writing was still there, but some of the feel of the previous novels was missing for me. I enjoyed, for example, the isolated setting and its meanings in The Ghost Writer. And even though what Zuckerman does with Amy Bellette’s past is not nearly as subtle a venue for metafiction as the body is in The Anatomy Lesson, I still think I enjoyed Zuckerman’s subversive exploitation of a completely unknowing Bellette more. As for my feelings for The Anatomy Lesson compared to Zuckerman Unbound, Alvin Peppler doesn’t make an appearance in The Anatomy Lesson. Happily, in The Anatomy Lesson we still have the pleasure of experiencing one of Roth’s energetic rants. This one comes from a progressingly drunk and drugged Zuckerman roaming around Chicago adopting the name of his hated critic Milton Appel. It gets better: he pretends to be Milton Appel, the grittiest of pornographers. In some classic ribaldry, Zuckerman/Appel become verbally incontinent for some pages, and that makes him feel a little better. But for some reason, even this did not match the fantastic rants and comedy of Alvin Peppler. I think it is because a ribald rant is easier to create (at least, they are far more common) than a self-pitying, Zuckerman-hating, importunate rant from the Alvin Peppler.
But that does not mean I wish Roth had quit with just the two previous novels. You’ll notice that my gripes with the novel are much more my own personal tastes and not to be mistaken as gripes about Roth’s style or tone here. He’s still spot on. In fact, this lesson in pain and anatomy goes deeper than the previous two about what it costs an individual to create through writing. I have The Prague Orgy sitting on my shelf . . . and I don’t know how long I can abstain!
After you read the book:
I think another element that, while enjoyable, made this book less pleasurable than the previous two was the ending. As much as I enjoyed it, it was not quite as ambiguous as the other two. In The Ghost Writer we get an excellent, pathetic scene in which Mrs. Lonoff walks alone down the wintry street while Zuckerman and Lonoff discuss the car’s problems. In Zuckerman Unbound we get the father’s death and Henry’s separation. We get a sense that it is a bitter relief for Zuckerman who then roams around the changed streets of Newark. But that didn’t happen here. The Anatomy Lesson ends with irony (which is to be expected) but it left me less with a sense of ambiguity about the calling of “writer” – in fact, it seemed to end with a judgment against Zuckerman. Here he is, a patient in the hospital going around seemingly concerned with the other patients. But he is actually collecting, with boyish excitement, material and “setting himself apart,” failing to accept that his perceived distance is not real, that he is one of the subjects, and that these people are indeed real. It seemed to cast him in a much poorer light than the previous novels which had also recognized this state of being as a legitimate price to pay to create.
Even though I enjoyed the other two novels more, though, this is a great ending. Zuckerman, we know, goes on. I cannot wait to find out what he does next!
Before you read the book:
While reading Zuckerman Unbound (1981), Roth’s sequel to the delightful (that’s only partially the right word) The Ghost Writer, I discovered something unexpected about myself. When I’m reading these books I must look as giddy as a teenage girl (and their moms) reading Twilight. My thrill is not some suave vampire, but fantastic sentences, incredible timing, and stunning depth!
In Zuckerman Unbound we meet Nathan Zuckerman in his thirties. Though his writing has been successful already, he just published his major work that launched him into stardom: Carnovsky. Now rich, famous, the subject of gossip columns, and well recognized as a literary genius, he must deal with the downside of his dream while transitioning into celebrity life. On the surface, that is what this book is about: being famous.
But what Roth has accomplished is so much more, delving deeply into the other elements in the life of a man who has achieved all he wanted but who is beginning to take the measure of the costs. Some of the costs are comical: “What the hell are you doing on a bus, with your dough?” (the first line in the novel). Others are disturbing, like his hilarious encounter with the Alvin Pepler, an incredibly amusing quasi-Herb Stempel, the guy who took the dive in the quiz show scandals. We are fortunate to have two extended discussions between Zuckerman and Pepler! Pepler, still furious that he, the obvious genius, took a fall and now has nothing to show for it, is trying to write a book about his life. Zuckerman, in a way, since both are from Newark and are Jewish, has written that book with Carnovsky. But these encounters and others are increasingly disturbing and potentially threatening:
Zuckerman the stupendous sublimator spawning Zuckermaniacs! A book, a piece of fiction bound between two covers, breeding living fiction exempt from all the subjugations of the page, breeding fiction unwritten, unreadable, unaccountable and uncontainable, instead of doing what Aristotle promised from art in Humanities 2 and offering moral perceptions to supply us with the knowledge of what is good or bad. . . . If only he could understand that it is the writers who are supposed to move the readers to pity and fear, not the other way around!
In the midst of this, Zuckerman encounters unwelcome feelings – is it potential regret about what this fame has cost his relationship with his family? He has already been divorced three times. From The Ghost Writer we know that his relationship with his family is strained because of his artistic subjects which they think are exploitative and case not only the family but the Jewish people in a negative light, a difficult thing for them to stomach so soon after the Holocaust. And now, to make matters worse, people think Zuckerman’s mother is Carnovsky’s mother. However, what Zuckerman feels is not exactly regret – not yet, at least. Here Zuckerman is analyzing whether he should feel regret. And everyone telling him he should be more repentent serve only to show him that he shouldn’t. That’s exactly the type of thing he’s trying to get away from. This along with the occasional maniac on the street cause Zuckerman to consider withdrawing from society:
First you lock yourself away in order to stir up your imagination, now you lock yourself away because you’ve stirred up theirs.
I only wish I could adequately convey what this book contains. It is not a simple “perils of fame and fortune” story. It is much more nuanced than that, thankfully. And on the side, Roth allows examination of other elements. For example, the book contains some hard glances at Newark, where both Roth and Zuckerman (and Pepler!) grew up, a city visibly declining in the 1960s. Zuckerman has moved to New York City, but his stories, like Carnovsky, take place in a pre-war Newark that no longer exists, and this has led to the implication that he has exploited it like he exploited his family.
Newark is finished, idiot! Newark is barbarian hordes and the Fall of Rome!
I have put off reading the next book in the series, The Anatomy Lesson, just in an attempt to prolong the joy.
After you read the book:
Having your father’s last word - ”bastard” – be directed at you must be difficult (and comical – I loved all the theories about what else it was he might have said “better,” “batter,” “faster”). But I really like how Roth does not allow the reader to fully sympathize with Zuckerman or with his father. In a way, the decline of Zuckerman’s relationship with his family is tragic, a higher cost to pay for art (and fame) than I am willing to pay, but my family isn’t the same as Zuckerman’s. I could easily see Zuckerman’s perspective. He’s cut the ties that have held him back. The reaction by his father has only strained things more given Zuckerman even more grounds for separation.
However, Zuckerman’s brother Henry has some painful insights into the matter, and sets himself as a great counter to Zuckerman’s emancipated state. Henry is in a marriage in which he feels obligated to stay. He has always sought to please others, including their father. Yet even now Henry is having an affair. Is it noble of Henry to keep up the façade? To let sleeping dogs lie just because it might be unpleasant to disclose the truth? To me, neither Zuckerman nor Henry are saintly. Neither of them have the answer.
Before you read the book:
Thank goodness for blogs! About a year ago I read Roth’s Everyman, and though I appreciated it, it didn’t make me want to read anything else by Roth. But there on the book shelves at the bookstore were lined up in a row many acclaimed books, but nothing convinced me I should spend my time with them. After reading how much John Self at The Asylum enjoyed Roth’s Zuckerman books in his review, though, I felt it was time.
What a pleasure! Roth’s writing alone is so precise and so simple that experiencing just the diction, let alone the pain and wry humor, of one sentence after another left me giddy. This is a master prose writer. Just look at how much he packs into a fairly straightforward introductory sentence:
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.
The whole book is like that. Each word does its job better than any other word in its place could. In the kind of simple prose that only the best writers accomplish, Roth lays out the story of Zuckerman’s overnight stay at the “hideaway” of the writer whom he worships, E. I. Lonoff, who not only has inspired Zuckerman’s writing, but has become a kind of surrogate father merely through the page:
In fact, my own first reading through Lonoff’s canon – as an orthodox college atheist and highbrow-in-training – had done more to make me realize how much I was still my family’s Jewish offspring than anything I had carried forward to the University of Chicago from childhood Hebrew lessons, or mother’s kitchen, or the discussions I used to hear among my parents and our relatives about hte perils of intermarriage, the problem of Santa Claus, and the injustice of medical-school quotas (quotas that, as I understood early on, accounted for my father’s career in chiropody and his ardent lifelong support of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League).
So in a sense, Zuckerman sees in Lonoff the definition of his own heritage. But all is not well at the Lonoff home. Also staying with Lonoff and his wife is Amy Bellette, one of Lonoff’s former students (and one of the funniest parts of the book is when Zuckerman sees her for the first time and wonders if Lonoff is her father). Amy’s presence has caused a bit of tension between Mr. and Mrs. Lonoff, that perculates during dinner after Amy has left. While eating dinner, Zuckerman explains to the Lonoffs how he has just seperated from his girlfriend, leaving out some of the more unflattering details:
Describing all her sterling qualities, I had, in fact, brought myself nearly to the point of grief, as though instead of wailing with pain and telling me to leave and never come back, the unhappy dancer had died in my arms on our wedding day.
Then, almost out of the blue, during the dinner Mrs. Lonoff demands that Lonoff throw her, Mrs. Lonoff, out of the house. She wants to leave him and Amy alone. She want release, breaking a glass for emphasis. All of this in front of Zuckerman, who is shaken:
My heart, of course, was pounding away, though not entirely because the sound of glass breaking and the sight of a disappointed woman, miserably weeping, was new to me. It was about a month old.
Of course, Mrs. Lonoff does not leave. Thus the book begins!
And I honestly would have been quite pleased with the book if the rest of it had been observations written in this wonderful style. As I said, Roth’s sentences are just fun to read! But that is far from all this book has to offer. This is not a puerile Bildungsroman, but the creation of an artist in the real sense, someone who consciously accepts a calling while recognizing what it costs - think Stephen Dedalus (because Roth wants you to). During the night’s stay, events conspire to bring Zuckerman face-to-face with his artistic calling. He’s already burned some bridges with his family, most heartbreakingly with his father who thinks he’s exploited and slandered his Jewish heritage and his family for artsake. Through the remainder of the novel, in a great bit of metafiction, Roth explores what sacrifices could/should/must be made in order to succeed in creating fiction that is true. The Ghost Writer is too rare a combination of perfect style and genuine substance.
After you read the book:
I was pleasantly, so very pleasantly, uncomfortable with Zuckerman’s exploitation of Amy Bellette (not to mention Anne Frank) to create his justification for why he must let his father go. Especially poignant considering it not only justified his sacrificing his family relations but also brought him back into the Jewish fold. How could they reject him if he is the husband of Anne Frank? I have shied away from The Plot Against America, believing that most alternative histories are hokey and should as a rule never be read. But after seeing how adept Roth is at making an alternative history not just interesting in the hypothetical sense but also important to an understanding of “the way things are,” I will be reading what Roth thinks would have happened if Lindbergh had won the 1940 presidential election.
Also, I admit with a bit of shame how much I enjoyed the final scene for its comedy and not just for its poignancy. Though I felt for Hope in her “higher calling,” and I flinched during her final scene (so pathetic), her falling on the ice, failing to start the car, and then finally walking away in her clunky snowboots (“when she turned into the road she immediately passed out of sight. But then, of course, she wasn’t very big to begin with.”) was really quite comic. Roth doesn’t let us fully pity her because all the while Zuckerman and Lonoff are commenting on the car battery. But this was one of those scenes that made me wonder if Roth meant them to be like Sidney:
Little children don’t realize that underneath the big blowhard who rolls on the floor and makes them laugh there can be somebody who makes other people cry.
With insights like that, that come around again in the end to show just what it costs to be an artist, it’s hard to blame Roth for the coldness in this final scene. What a rich book! I’m so glad I still have the rest of the Zuckerman books in front of me.
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