Zuckerman Bound, a Great Meta-Sequel
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 shitface.’ 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.
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