Odd Jobs (69 page)

It is the familial milieu of those early infantile gratifications that Zuckerman and his predecessors in Roth’s fiction unforgivably violate, first by masturbation and then by sexual traffic with the dirty girls of the goyim and finally by the production of a “hate-filled, mocking best-seller” that, poisonous with “the tastelessness that had affronted millions, and the shamelessness that had enraged his tribe,” kills the father and brings down his curse. The curse is reinforced by the adverse literary verdict of Milton Appel, against whom Zuckerman rages with an obsessive passion that amazes and bores his sensible Wasp girlfriend Diana. He explains, “I’m a petty, raging, vengeful, unforgiving Jew, and I have been insulted one time too many by another petty, raging, vengeful, unforgiving Jew.” Roth, though accused, like Zuckerman, of writing anti-Semitically or at least in mockery of middle-class American Jewry, seems in this book the most Jewish of Jewish-American writers; Bellow can take pleasure in contemplating the gentile bohunks of Chicago, and Malamud can enjoy a Thoreauvian jog in the woods, and Mailer can get turned on by astronauts and Marilyn Monroe and Utah low life, but for Zuckerman as Roth has imagined him there is
no
authenticity away from the bosom of Abraham. If Milton Appel weren’t Jewish, who would care what he says? Zuckerman’s shiksas are so much nicely designed wallpaper on the walls of his cell; blacks have moved into his old Newark neighborhood and he feels as thoroughly exiled as Nabokov from Russia.

Jewishness figures as the one conceptual thread woven into the primal Newark nest, and
The Anatomy Lesson
contains a number of sociological reflections upon it, from “Jewish mothers know how to own their suffering boys” to “The disputatious stance, the aggressively marginal sensibility, the disavowal of community ties, the taste for scrutinizing a social event as though it were a dream or a work of art—to Zuckerman this was the very mark of the intellectual Jews … on whom he was modeling his
own style of thought.” More instinctively and symptomatically, the tenderness that bestows liveliness breaks into the narrator’s monologue whenever an elderly Jewish male—Dr. Kotler, Mr. Freytag—makes an appearance; these are really the only characters, as distinguished from apparitions and interlocutors, that this novel has, the only bringers of life separate from the hero’s tortured vitality. Roth has been preëminently a celebrant of a son’s world. Who else has given us so many vivid, comical, shrewdly seen but above all lovingly preserved mothers and fathers in fiction? Or has so faithfully kept fresh as moral referent the sensations of childhood? Rousing from a doped stupor, Zuckerman sees from his limousine windows that it has begun to snow, and thinks, “There was nothing that could ever equal coming home through the snow in late afternoon from Chancellor Avenue School.” “I am not an authority on Israel,” he protests when approached to write a
Times
Op-Ed column in defense of the Jewish State, “I’m an authority on Newark. Not even on Newark. On the Weequahic section of Newark. If the truth be known, not even on the whole of the Weequahic section. I don’t even go below Bergen Street.”

John O’Hara was equally localized by the streets of Pottsville, but showed no disposition to linger; indeed, he once advised an old friend to “write something that automatically will sever your connection with the town.” Nothing in Irish tribal sense asked the torment that Zuckerman visits upon himself. A diagnosis of his complaint comes early in
The Anatomy Lesson
and is not improved upon by his medical researches later on. “The crippling of his upper torso was, transparently, the punishment called forth by his crime: mutilation as primitive justice. If the writing arm offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee. Beneath the ironic carapace of a tolerant soul, he [Nathan Zuckerman] was the most unforgiving Yahweh of them all.” Zuckerman does not forgive himself, either, for spilling his seed upon the ground; he has had three childless marriages and, in his fantasy life as Milton Appel the messianic pornographer, assigns himself a fourth wife and a seven-year-old son—whom he names Nathan! His rage and pain peak in a scene, fabulous as a holy crisis out of Malamud or Singer, wherein the hallucinating author, chanting the praises of the Lord “who bringeth forth from the earth the urge to spurt that maketh monkeys of us all,” attempts to strangle one more tenderly, comically rendered Jewish father, and comes up against the “Gestapo boots” of his female, pigtailed, Lutheran chauffeur. And the author, no mean Yahweh himself, contrives to smash Zuckerman on his offending part, his babbling, mocking, pleading mouth.

The Chicago scenes are visionary, and stay with the reader. Throughout, a beautiful passion to be honest propels the grinding, whining paragraphs. Yet, though lavish with laughs and flamboyant invention,
The Anatomy Lesson
seemed to this Roth fan the least successful of the Zuckerman trio, the least objectified and coherent. The pages devoted to Zuckerman’s mental, epistolary, and finally telephonic quarrel with Milton Appel especially manifested a disproportion between the energy expended and the area of expenditure. True, there
are
shrewd, intelligent negative reviews which an author has to fight against as if fighting for his life; but by the age of forty a writer should be rising above the home-town beefs and metropolitan bad notices that go with the job, and perhaps by the age of fifty a writer should have settled his old scores. Zuckerman’s babyish reduction of all women to mere suppliers eclipses much of Roth’s engaging characterization of the mistresses, who are each set before us never to appear again. The book is elegant action writing, a hyperaware churning full of observations but thin (unlike
The Ghost Writer
) on characters the author respects; instead of characters
The Anatomy Lesson
has demons, and these are powerfully agitated but not exorcised. Neither Zuckerman nor his creator seems quite to realize that by aspiring to become a nice good-doing doctor the author of
Carnovsky
is at last knuckling under to Judge Wapter.

Z
UCKERMAN
B
OUND:
A Trilogy and Epilogue
, by Philip Roth. 784 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985.

To the previously published short novels
The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound
, and
The Anatomy Lesson
Mr. Roth has added an epilogue, “The Prague Orgy,” which shows his protagonist, the American literary man Nathan Zuckerman, involved with some raffish Czech counterparts in an attempt to smuggle out of Prague a manuscript of short stories by an unknown Yiddish writer slain by the Nazis. The painful contortions of human art and spirit under Communism are sketched with a bleak abruptness, in a strange mood of wistful farce; here, as for the perennially
homeless Jews, the chief activity is “the construction of narrative art out of the exertions of survival.” In toto,
Zuckerman Bound
shows the author’s always ebullient invention and artful prose at their most polished and concentrated, the topic of authorship clearly being, to this author, a noble one. His repeated hints that his hero’s misadventures connect with wider historical sufferings fail to persuade us, however, that they amount to significantly more than those of a gifted male child oppressed first by his fond parents and then by other admirers. Described as “the American authority on Jewish demons,” Zuckerman counters the pangs of apprenticeship, success, and writer’s block with a mounting irritability and a frantic, hilarious, anguished eloquence that leaves little air for any other characters to breathe; indeed, except as irritants and as display windows for Mr. Roth’s great powers of mimicry, characters other than Zuckerman scarcely exist. Though a number of biologically complete females add to the hero’s embarrassments, the nearest approach to a heroine, in nearly eight hundred pages, is Anne Frank’s ghost. Proust, the author of another epic of the self striving to bear fruit, by comparison gave us Albertine, Odette, and Marcel’s grandmother. But perhaps an analogue closer than
Remembrance of Things Past
would be Melville’s
Pierre
, in which another driven young writer tortuously struggles with the besieging shadows of a feminized, claustrophobic America.

T
HE
C
OUNTERLIFE
, by Philip Roth. 324 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.

Philip Roth’s new novel takes many turns and treats of many topics, including, for some especially fine pages, that of impassioned dentistry; but it is mostly about Israel, erections, and writing fiction. In this it resembles much of the author’s post-
Portnoy
fiction—and one of Portnoy’s complaints, you may remember, was that he became impotent in the state of Israel. Impotence is the starting point of the present novel of surging self-explanation, -exploration, -excoriation, and -justification,
this time voiced by Nathan Zuckerman, whom we have met before. The Zuckerman trilogy-plus was preceded by the appearance of Zuckerman in the first third of
My Life as a Man
(1974), as the hero of two “Useful Fictions” written by the novel’s real (whatever that means) hero, Peter Tarnopol. In the first of these stories, “Salad Days,” the twice-fictional Zuckerman has an older brother, Sherman—a pianist who runs a highschool band, goes off to the Navy in 1945, and returns to marry “some skinny Jewish girl from Bala-Cynwyd who talked in baby talk and worked as a dental technician somewhere” and to become an orthodontist. The brother is absent from the second useful fiction, “Courting Disaster,” and from
The Ghost Writer
, but in
Zuckerman Unbound
he reappears as a
younger
brother, named Henry, a dentist with a wife, Carol, and three children in New Jersey—“the good son,” flawed only by a weak heart and an occasional extramarital affair. He is “the tallest, darkest, and handsomest by far of all the Zuckerman men, a swarthy, virile, desert Zuckerman whose genes, uniquely for their clan, seemed to have traveled straight from Judea to New Jersey without the Diaspora detour.” Nathan looks at Henry over their father’s deathbed and thinks:

At the climax of
Zuckerman Unbound
, however, this softer and gentler Zuckerman turns on Nathan and furiously tells him that his writing is what has killed their father and that the old man’s last utterance had been to call his older son a bastard. These accusations rankle throughout
The Anatomy Lesson
, but Henry and his family remain estranged from Nathan and scarcely appear in the book.

Now, in
The Counterlife
, Henry returns, as co-hero. It is he who, as a side effect of a beta-blocking medication taken to relieve his coronary disease and hypertension, is rendered impotent; it is he who, caught up in torrid liaisons with a German-Swiss patient called Maria and then with a dental assistant called Wendy, suffers the pangs of Portnoy’s Complaint, clinically defined in the novel of the same name as “a disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” The
disorder, displaced onto Henry’s conventional, dutiful, family-bound existence, regains intensity and interest. Explosion requires constraint. The trouble with the other Zuckerman as an agonist was that he had become too free: a rich writer, thrice married but usually a bachelor when we see him in Roth’s fictions, Nathan is able to fly where he wants, have whom he wants, analyze and clown away whatever he doesn’t like, and concentrate entirely upon his own psyche and anatomy. If he is less than heroic, it is because the task he keeps setting himself and keeps being unable to perform—to break out of self-obsession enough to establish a family and become a father—is, for most heterosexual males, ridiculously easy.
^*
In fact, biology and inertia usually do it for you. But for Zuckerman the writer, nothing comes, or goes, easy; he has been stewing over the mixed critical reception of his best-selling
Carnovsky
(1969) for nearly ten years (
The Counterlife
occurs in 1978) and rehashing his boyhood ever since it happened. “Tell me something,” his exasperated brother, Henry, asks him, “is it at all possible … for you to have a frame of reference slightly larger than the kitchen table in Newark?” For Zuckerman the dentist, father, and husband—“a young man still largely propelled by feelings of decorum that he had imbibed and internalized and never seriously questioned”—lust is still an unhackneyed, majestic disruption subject to no mitigating literary uses and deformations. This five-part novel’s first section, “Basel,” describing Henry’s affairs and his decision to undergo a life-threatening coronary-bypass operation that will restore his potency, has the vital freshness, the vivid
minor characters, and implied communal pressure of
Goodbye, Columbus
(1959), Roth’s first bracing dip into the surging waters of Newark Jewishness and sexuality.

The four remaining chapters give back, I think, some of the bright life borrowed from this shift of interest onto the brother. Unlike James Joyce and Thomas Mann, to whom the theme of competitive fraternity was objectively, oppressively present, Roth conceives brotherhood as another exercise in egoism. Nathan says of brothers, “How they know each other, in my experience, is as a kind of deformation of themselves.” Indeed, almost all the characters in
The Counterlife
, including the women, exist as deformations of the hero, or as curved mirrors giving back an exaggerated aspect of him. As if to proclaim imaginative distortion as the heart and soul of fiction (and to plead Not Guilty to charges of indecent exposure and invaded privacy), the novel incorporates discontinuous variations of its central situation. The plot bifurcates, revises itself, cross-examines itself, tries things several ways. In the first chapter, Henry dies during the heart operation; in the second, “Judea,” Henry has survived and has fled his family and practice by going (as if in fulfillment of that “desert” quality casually ascribed in the earlier novel) to Israel and taking up with a Zionist zealot. In the fourth chapter, it is Nathan who has the heart problem, the impotence, and the mistress called Maria. In pursuing these variations, the virtuoso imaginer rarely falters; satisfying details of place and costume, astonishing diatribes, beautifully heard and knitted dialogues unfold in chapters impeccably shaped, packed, and smoothed. No other writer combines such a surface of colloquial relaxation and even dishevelment with such depth of meditating intelligence. Nathan, pondering the Hebraized, suntanned Henry, reflects “about this swift and simple conversion of a kind that isn’t readily allowed to writers unless they wish to commit the professional blunder of being uninquiring.” Inquiring the writing certainly is; the way in which yet one more insight, one more psychological wrinkle, is visited upon an already thoroughly explicated situation (Henry’s resentment of Nathan, Nathan’s condescension to Henry) is as thrilling as, in another sort of novel, one more body discovered in the library. The narrator is always striving to surmount his feelings, pains, animosities, rages; the narrative suggests two fast-moving, slippery wrestlers constantly breaking each other’s holds, the wrestlers matched with an interminable equality because they are really one wrestler.