Philip Roth: Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue 1979-1985 (Library of America) [Hardcover]

With the publication of his wildly successful and outrageously funny Portnoy's Complaint in 1969, Philip Roth formally entered the ranks of America's up and coming must-read literary stars. But it also opened a Pandora's box of issues having to do with the fact that Portnoy was depicted as explicitly Jewish, sexually obsessed, and that Roth's portrayal of Portnoy's Jewish family was much less than flattering.

America in 1969 remember, was culturally only a few years removed from Jewish quotas for medical and law school acceptances, and restricted country clubs, hotels and real estate. Years later Jon Stuart (who was 7 years old in 1969) would joke in a stage whispered "Is it good for the Jews?" but in 1969 this question was asked more seriously by American Jews still not entirely trusting of or comfortable living in a country that had refused admittance to thousands of would-be Jewish émigrés from Germany in the 40s.

Sixteen years later we have Zuckerman Bound, comprised of the three novels originally published separately: The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and the novella The Prague Orgy (1969), in which Roth brilliantly addresses these issues of personal and artistic identity head-on. Nathan Zuckerman, the protagonist throughout all four books is clearly Roth's alter ego, and Zuckerman's published book, Carnovsky, (Roth's Portnoy's Complaint) succeeds commercially and foments conflict between Zuckerman and his father, brother and a raft of father surrogates.

Is Roth's hilarious but incisive depiction of these Jewish characters a matter of artistic integrity or cultural betrayal? He could have left the question unanswered after writing Portnoy. He could have moved on to the next book and left it well enough alone. Instead, over the course of at least these four books, he explores the issue directly and he does so in what I think is a most powerful way, by going to the meta-level: the story about the story about the story.... In this case Roth's surrogate, Zuckerman is himself facing these very dilemma(s).

The issues of cultural/artistic identity are developed progressively through the four books with the father-son conflict theme introduced in the first novel where Zuckerman's father pleas with him not to publish a short story exposing the family's scandalous conflict between the family's black sheep nephew and his aunt over an inheritance.

In the second book, the theme is extended to include Zuckerman's brother's accusation that the publication of Carnofsky caused their father's death with its insulting portrayal of Carnovsky's mother.

In The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman's struggle is with his two father surrogates, Appel, the Jewish literary critic and self-appointed defender of the Jewish people against the infidel Zuckerman, and later, Mr. Freytag, his college roommate's father.

Finally, in The Prague Orgy, as these themes are air-lifted into the state controlled communist regime of 1976 Czechoslovakia, the intriguing notion is introduced of the writer as spy on his own life and that of others in his life. Talk about the "meta level." Here we have the ultimate self- referential burlesque of Kafka. Particularly emblematic here is the hilariously macabre vignette of the Czech writer who agreed to spy on himself and to write reports for the state on his own life for his police informant friend because the friend was not a good writer:

"I said, `Blecha, I will follow myself for you. I know what I do all day better than you, and I have nothing else to keep me busy. I will spy on myself and I will write it up, and you can submit it to them as your own. They will wonder how your rotten writing has improved overnight, but you just tell them you were sick. This way you won't have anything damaging on your record, and I can be rid of your company, you (expletive deleted).' Blecha was thrilled. He gave me half of what they paid him...."

In this fourth book, the whole matter of the rebellion from authority - the struggle between fathers and sons begun in the Ghost Writer and developed more in Zuckerman Unbound - (did he kill his own father?) takes on a whole new level when it is the state assuming the authority role through its censorship of literary work.

All of the above does not begin to do justice to Roth's first-rate authenticity in writing dialogue and creating characters, and most of all, the sheer hilarity with which he explores issues that go deeply into what it means to be human.

Zuckerman is Roth's equivalent to that other 20th Century fictional alter-ego, Updike's Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom. But while Updike's character is an American everyman, his average desires, inclinations, career and relationships drawn with the fine pen, the two inches of ivory of Updike's conventional East Coast suburbs; Roth's Zuckerman swings wildly through the American beserk on a roiling stream of consciousness that takes him from noble, high purpose striving writer in his early twenties, visiting his hero E.I. Lonoff, to wrecked, neurotic acclaimed (and reviled) man of letters in his forties.

Roth's Zuckerman books are perhaps his string of writing where the gap between the banks of life and art are at their narrowest. Zuckerman finds fame with his novel of Jewish sexual guilt (Carnovsky) and has to cope out with the fall out of that success - accosted on the bus, in the street, outside his appartment, by cranks, the media, people accusing him of being an anti Semitic Jew, his family accusing him of betraying their secrets.

Zuckerman's great contradiction - yearning for liberty, but recognising the innate drive towards inhibition and security leads to a fastinating portrayal of themes towards the middle and end of the trilogy plus coda. By middle age Zuckerman, wracked with pain, drugs and an emotional life more messy than Woody Allen's (a nice counterpoint, there, considering Allen's 1998 Roth-lite film 'Deconstructing Harry') decides his pursuit of literary greatness has lead to his unravelling and decides to train as a doctor. A ludicrous and comic plan that leads to an encounter with a pornographer, and a journey to the heart of darkness of the health system.

The coda, 'The Prague Orgy', is a fitting finale. Shorter than the others, a novella of some eighty pages, the scene changes to Communist Prague as Zuckerman travels there in a futile attempt to claim the manuscript of some Yiddish short stories for a Czech friend of his in New York. There he meets Olga, a trashy vamp of a woman, wife of the deceased artist, whose desperate plight forces Zuckerman to review his own precarious and turbulent liberty. He also gets a lecture from the Czech authorities who take a very different view of the value of culture and freedom to Zuckerman.

Overall, a fascinating portrait of a late 20th Century American literary celebrity. But what an ego! Roth, like Updike, thinks the importance of his own life is of such supreme magnitude that the whole world should take notice and listen. Roth is not Zuckerman, of course, but when he says things such as 'When there are banners across Manhattan calling for the return of Portnoy, I might act', you realise that he shares with his fictional creation a concern to write his own will on world. The great American novelists of this period -Bellow (gone), Roth and Updike (going, slowly) are all in this mould. There is a world outside their own neurosis, their own back problems, their own concerns with mortality. This world is glimpsed at in 'The Prague Orgy'. Roth also grasped this nettle during his late period flowering - The Human Stain, American Pastoral etc.. Were that he had discovered this external world earlier on in the Zuckerman trilogy.

Philip Roth: Zuckerman Bound 1979-1985 is the Library of America's fourth volume of Philip Roth's collected works. Presenting "The Ghost Writer", "Zuckerman Unbound", "The Anatomy Lesson", "The Prague Orgy", and "The Prague Orgy: A Television Adaptation" by Philip Roth, along with a chronology and extensive notes that help illuminate context and nuances of the text, Philip Roth: Zuckerman Bound 1979-1985 is the ideal edition for literature students, libraries, and casual readers alike. The particularly memorable title story, Zuckerman Bound, is set at the close of the sensational 60's and follows popular writer Zuckerman as he struggles to cope with the aftershock of literary celebrity. Highly recommended.

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