Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld (review)

In 1921, Luigi Pirandello wrote the modernist play Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore). Pia Masiero, who, like Pirandello, is Italian, has written a book that might be called “Nathan Zuckerman in Search of Roth” or, contrariwise, “Philip Roth in Search of Zuckerman.” As Masiero states early in her book, “Zuckerman’s is the self that helps Roth the most in getting himself through: it is the cornerstone in the construction of ‘Philip Roth’” (4). As such, she reads “Nathan Zuckerman across multiple narratives in order to unearth biographical interconnections and trace the portrait of the Rothian artist” (4).

Now that Zuckerman (or his ghost) has exited stage right, and now that Philip Roth has retroactively reordered his works into Zuckerman books, Kepesh books, Roth books, and Other books, the time is ripe for an evaluation of all the Zuckerman books, which is the task that Masiero has undertaken in her fine, path-breaking study. She analyzes the nine Zuckerman novels in which the character functions as protagonist and/or narrator, from The Ghost Writer (1979) through Exit Ghost (2007), as well as two other works in which Zuckerman appears as a character: My Life as a Man (1974), where Zuckerman makes his first appearance in Roth’s oeuvre as the protagonist of the fictional Jewish American novelist Peter Tarnopol’s opening two stories entitled “Useful Fictions”; and The Facts (1988), where Roth allows Zuckerman the last word, critiquing Roth’s own autobiography.

Masiero’s method is narratological, analyzing the ways we read and how Roth structures his narratives to create effects on the reader; Roth, a fictional games player par excellence, seems to demand such an approach. Such a method allows Masiero to consider such issues such as narrative point of view, the order in which events are related, the blending of narrative “fact” with Zuckerman’s imaginings as a novelist, and even paratextual matter such as Roth’s dedications and epigraphs. Her central argument seems to be that, in the Zuckerman books, “Roth reaffirms via his alter ego the paradoxical key tenet of his poetics, that life cannot be understood before it becomes a book” (212).

This is an well researched and sophisticated study with an extensive bibliography, drawing not only on the large and growing body of Roth criticism (the Roth critics most often cited are Debra Shostak, Ross Posnock, David Brauner, Derek Parker Royal, Timothy Parrish, and Mark Shechner) but also on the reader-response theories of Wolfgang Iser and Richard J. Gerrig; on recent narratological critics such as Thomas Pavel, James Phelan, Monica Fludernik, Alan Palmer, and Emma Kafalenos; on the cognitive narratology of Lisa Zunshine, David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marina Grishakova; and on the studies of paratextual material of Gérard Genette. Since she also deals with Roth’s autobiography, The Facts, she relies as well on recent theoretical studies of autobiography by Paul Eakin, James Olney, Wallace Fowlie, Manuela Alberca, and José Maria Pozuelo Ivancos. Particularly impressive is the international range of the scholarship, referring, in addition to criticism in English, to works in Italian, Spanish, and French, for which she provides her own translations.

However, one of Masiero’s main challenges is to trace the evolution of Nathan Zuckerman over the course of many works and many decades and to see if he is recognizably the same character, rather than many characters who happen to have the same profession of novelist and to all be named Zuckerman. According to Masiero, “One of the aims of this work is to bring to the fore the issue of consistency, to question inconsistencies and discontinuities, and to assess the continuous repatterning of the interpretive frame Nathan Zuckerman goes through” (8). As such, Masiero struggles valiantly with the inconsistencies between the many different versions of Zuckerman. She concludes that, although the facts of Zuckerman’s life may shift from book to book, he nevertheless remains a...