Zuckerman Bound [Paperback]

Two Great Male Narcissists, as writer David Foster Wallace termed them: Roth and Updike. Their respective famous fictional protagonists: Nathan Zuckerman, author, in the case of Roth, Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, businessman, in the case of Updike.

The difference, is that while Updike writes about the American everyman, semi-sexist, middle of the road educated, normal dreams, ambitions, lifestyle; Roth takes for his subject the late 20th Century American beserk, from a quintessentially Jewish angle, in projecting his own concerns as a writer and a human being onto Zuckerman, who lists wildly from one crisis to another as he tries to cope with the fame from his position as one of America's most revered (and reviled) writers.

Zuckerman bound is a 500+ page volume of four Zuckerman novels - The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and The Prague Orgy. Together they work as a whole, reading them as one novel traces the oscillating arc of Zuckerman's consciousness from eager, striving 20 something writer visiting his hero, writer E.I. Lonoff in New England to the middle aged fictioneer, successful on the back of his novel of Jewish sexual guilt 'Carnovsky' and trying to make sense of his life and its themes. In Zuckerman Unbound, Roth's most clear disquisition on fame, and its fallouts, Zuckerman trying to live a normal life finds himself accosted by cranks, zealots, media junkies and celebrities. He takes a bashing for his percieved self hating Semitism, while his family attack him for betraying their secrets. In the Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman suffering a mid -career attack of extreme physical pain - the tortured twisted spine, the inability to be comfortable to write single predicate, the wreck of his personal life - decides that a dramatic change of course is required. Training as a Doctor will be the tonic, providing stability and emotional value, something he feels is missing from his life as a man inclined to solitary musings bent over a typewriter. He learns valuable lessons from a mishap which leads him closer to the real centre of the health system than he would have wished.

The Prague Orgy, to conclude the volume, is a short story, 60 or so pages. Zuckerman is forced to review his position as a narcissistic emotional wreck atop the mountain of the biggest, wildest literary scene in the Free World. A visit to Communist Czechoslovakia to try and claim some Yiddish stories for a Czech friend he encounters in New York leads to an encounter with Olga, a vampish libertine sexually charged writer who tries to brow-beat him into marriage, and the Czech authorities, who take a very different view of the nature of freedom and the place of literature than Zuckerman does.

Over the course of the work, the pitch zig-zags furiously from the elegant and exquisite heights of descriptive prose to the oily, grotty gutters of the messed up psyche. It is a very personal breadth of fiction, the life of a writer forced through a fictional filter, often with seemingly minimal distillation process from life to art.

The dominant writers in second half 20th Century America - Roth, Updike, Bellow, have all taken their own lives as their great subject, in one form or another. They are truly narcissists in the magnitude of their ego, and the importance they place on every tiny machination of their soul. When they go (Bellow already, Roth and Updike, but especially Roth, railing against the dying of the light), the whole world, in their view, goes with them. David Foster Wallace makes this point very well in a scathing review of Updike collected in his essay Collection 'Consider the Lobster'. All three are great writers, but will their egos survive through the centuries like Homer's, like Dante's, like Shakespeare's? Or will they be remembered primarily as avid chroniclers of an age, but ultimately swept back, their places in the firmament shuffled along by new writers and new seers and new consciousnesses?

I venture the latter.