Formal Antagonisms: How Philip Roth Writes Nathan Zuckerman

Philip Roth's alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman utters his first words in the opening lines of The Ghost Writer (1979):¹

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 Bildung-sroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman—when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man.²

In the opening sentence of the first of nine volumes about his life, Zuckerman cuts himself off mid-sentence and starts again. Roth embeds one independent clause inside another; em dashes boldly offset a trailing independent clause nested within an opening clause. The syntax that this maneuver creates is not only intricate, it is cunning—and is integral to how Roth writes Nathan Zuckerman at the level of form. Together, these concentrically arranged clauses supply the time frame, the snowy Massachusetts setting, the matter at hand (the literary life as material for story writing), and the narrative voice for the story and the central character that are to follow: Nathan Zuckerman's account of an evening spent with the famed Jewish author E. I. Lonoff in 1956, its effect on his then-budding literary career, and the events that lead him to imagine that Amy Bellette, one of Lonoff's beautiful paramours is, in fact, Anne Frank.

The tone of the opening clause is nearly that of a fairy tale. "It was the last daylight hour" announces that a story is going to be told every bit as much as "Once upon a time" or "In a land far, far away." Through tone that is as cozy as a bedtime story, the reader settles in for a yarn. Before the story can take off, however, an interjecting clause cuts the story short. This does not simply carry the reader away from the story momentarily, but also interrupts the telling of the story from the outset by braking abruptly to make room for the interpolated phrase. The fact that the embedded clause is set off by em dashes, as opposed to less halting and disruptive commas or parentheses, suggests that Nathan's autobiographical and meta-fictional gloss is every bit as important as the "story" itself, which had already gathered momentum in the very first words. This interjecting clause is not an aside. It is a second beginning, equal to the first in every way.

The em dashes, then, are not brief pauses that allow for a momentary digression from the story. They are the opposite; they are shards of punctuation that hold up the continuation of the story so as to clear room, literally, for a new thought. The result is that the story (the first clause) is not just temporarily waylaid or decelerated by life and art (the intruding independent clause). It is brought to a standstill, interjected upon, brought down a peg. Grammatically and metaphorically, neither clause is dependent. Form is so inseparable from content in Roth that syntax operates metaphorically—a dependent clause can be read as a metaphor for a dependent relationship.

Moreover, Roth has built this sentence so as to put the two clauses on equal footing. Were the em dashes to be replaced by parentheses or commas, the embedded clause would become secondary to the foremost clause, the enclosed clause becoming a digression or the piping-up of an intrusive narrator. Here is how it would read with parentheses instead of em dashes:

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.

More than the language, even, Roth's strong choice of punctuation (em dashes) begins to develop an implicit point, one that is worked out over the course of the novel and over the complete term of the Zuckerman saga: life cannot be absorbed into fiction, as if one is contained within...