Philip Roth: Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy & Epilogue 1979-1985 (LOA #175): The Ghost Writer / Zuckerman Unbound / The Anatomy Lesson / The Prague Orgy (Library of America) Hardcover – 20 Sept. 2007

The Library of America has recognized the importance of Philip Roth by publishing his complete novels in a uniform set of nine volumes. This volume includes the three novels and epilogue that Roth himself grouped together and subsequently published as "Zuckerman Bound". The novels tell the story of a novelist, Nathan Zuckerman, at various critical moments of his life. Roth subsequently wrote additional novels with Zuckerman as the protagonist, but these four works stand as a set.There is a broad, dazzling array of writing in these books. The strong ego of both the author and his character are on full display. Initial impressions are important and these books show at the outset sharp humor, irony, and irreverance. These qualities are combined with an equally important degree of thought and introspection. Sexuality and its difficulties pervade these books, from the restraint imposed upon a young man from family and religious tradition to, perhaps, the different restraint suggested later in time by certain forms of feminism. Throughout the books, Zuckerman struggles with his vocation as a writer and with his Jewishness. He responds in different ways throughout the novels. The books suggest, at length, that a person, a writer particularly must learn to live with ambiguity and conflict. For example, late in the final book of the trilogy, "The Anatomy Lesson", Zuckerman observes."Oh, too delicate, too delicate by far for even your own contradictions. The experience of contradiction is the human experience; everybody's balancing that baggage-- how can you knuckle under to that? A novelist without his irreconciliable halves, quarters, eighths, and sixteenths?"Nathan Zuckerman bears many resemblances to Roth, but it would be a mistake to conflate character and author. A major these that runs through the books is the relationship between events and characters and their portrayal in an imaginative work of fiction. Roth embroiders on this theme through playing upon the Roth-Zuckerman relationship and through many scenes and details in the books.The books begin with Zuckerman in young adulthood, and it might be useful to sketch the backround of Zuckerman's life as presented throughout the trilogy. Zuckerman was born in the 1930's and spent his childhood in Newark, New Jersey. His family was culturally and religiously Jewish, although for the most part nonobservant. His mother and father had risen from immigrant poverty to the modest life of the middle class. Zuckerman's father was a foot doctor and his mother a homemaker. Zuckerman had a brother four years his junior. Showing an early precocity and passion for literature, Zuckerman was admitted to the University of Chicago at the age of 16 and graduated with high marks. He served two years in the Army and, upon his discharge, began his literary career in earnest. With this background, the Zuckerman Trilogy begins, and I will briefly describe each book in what follows.Told in the first person, "The Ghost Writer" features a 23 year old Nathan Zuckerman who has received an invitation from a writer he reveres, Lonoff, to visit at his secluded home in the Berkshires. Lonoff sees in the young man a writer of promise and offers a toast to his future as an author who will thrive on "turbulence". Zuckerman has just endured a stormy break-up with a young woman due to his being flagrantly unfaithful one time too many. Zuckerman is about to publish a short story which has father belives casts his family and the Newark Jewish community in an unflattering light. At first, Zuckerman tries to see Lonoff as a father figure but in the course of the book has reason to be put off by this remote and cold man. Lonoff is rigid and aloof from his wife and may be involved with a mysterious young protege and immigrant Amy Belette. Infatuated with Amy, Zuckerman invents an outrageous story about her to help make peace with his family. The sacredness of the writer's or artist's calling loses much of its luster to Zuckerman in this book, but he dauntlessly proceeds."Zukerman Unbound", the second book of the trilogy is told in third person narration and is set in New York City when Zuckerman is in his mid-30s. By this time, Zuckerman has published four novels, and has achieved both wealth and notoriety by the most recent of the four, titled "Carnovsky". This book is a thinly-veiled reference to Roth's own "Portnoy's Complaint" and describes a young adolescent's sexual frustration growing up in Newark and what he perceives as the smothering of his parents. Young Carnovsky becomes an ardent practitioner of masturbation. In the novel, "Carnovsky" attracts many readers by its brutal frankness and humor and repels almost as many. Zuckerman, a solitary and introspective man, must deal with the in many ways unsought for fame. He also must deal in the book with his three failed marriages and with the death of his father. On his deathbed, Zuckerman's aging father curses and disowns what he sees as his reprobate, apostate son. Nathan Zuckerman again must persevere and carry on.The final book in the trilogy, "The Anatomy Lesson" is set four years after "Zuckerman Unbound" in New York City and Chicago and is also recounted by a third person narrator. This book shows Zuckerman at the end of a four year writer's block following the publication of "Carnovsky" Zuckerman also is plagued by mysterious, debilitating physical ailments. Four young women tend to him at different times and satisfy his carnal and other needs. The book includes long scenes of the death of Zuckerman's mother, which followed his father's death within about a year. The book breaks into two parts. In the first, Zuckerman struggles with his sorrow, his illness, his angers and conflicts and his writer's block. While he seemingly decides to abandon writing and become a physician, Zuckerman, unknown to himself, discovers latent sources of strength. In the second part of the book, set in Chicago, Zuckerman undergoes a severe accident and beating but discovers himself. He reinvents himself by imagining his life as a callous and successful pornographer and so persuades the reader with great gusto. With his conflicts, he is still able to move ahead.The epilogue to the trilogy, "The Prague Orgy" is in the nature of a coda. Some critics see this epilogue as the highlight of the entire work, but I think it more of a short teasing anticlimax. The epilogue is recounted from what purport to be Zuckerman's notebooks. It is told in the first person and is set in New York and in Prague in 1976, with Soviet control of the city. Zuckerman travels to Prague in search of what he has been told are stories in Yiddish by a writer killed by the Nazis. Among many sexual scenes and portrayals of communist repression, Zuckerman thinks again about the nature of the writer's calling. The story is tinged with irony as at its climax the cultural commissar lectures Zuckerman about the responsibility of the creative artist to develop and articulate the values expressed by a culture rather than engaging in an effort to mock and undermine these values. The double irony is that this function may be a proper and neglected role of the writer and intellectual in the contemporary United States while it is a source of repression and hypocrisy in the communist world of Prague. The Zuckerman trilogy takes a different turn in its brief epilogue.Roth is a storyteller. His "Zuckerman" novels are richly detailed, full of bluster, ranting, and thought. They are infuriating, thought provoking and funny. Many readers, not only Roth, may identify with at least some of Zuckerman, his issues, and his ways of working towards resolution. The Zuckerman Trilogy deserves its place in the Library of America as a work describing and elucidating important parts of the American experience.Robin Friedman

Episodes from the life of a Jewish American writer, a `trilogy with an epilogue', written in the 1970s/80s and set in the 1950s-70s.It starts with `The Ghost Writer' set in the 1950s. 20 years later, writer Nathan Zuckerman remembers. As a young man, a student and budding writer, he visited his idol, a literary great, at his home in the Berkshires.The young man's thoughts were preoccupied by an ongoing conflict with his father about Nathan's way of depicting Jewish life. A conflict of Joycian dimensions, while the older writer's situation is more Jamesian.Mental romance is added by a young female visitor with unclear identity. Nathan builds an instant crush and imagines her being Anne Frank as a survivor. Wouldn't that solve his trouble with dad?Volume 2 is `Zuckerman Unbound'. 15 years later, young Nathan is unbound in many ways. He has made money from a bestseller. His father is in a Florida nursing home with dementia and can't accuse him any longer. His mother never accused him anyway, only her friends do. He is separated from his third wife, an unbearable waspish do-gooder. He lives in Manhattan, society is open to his new stardom, and he has only his own paranoid state of mind to blame for his continued troubles.His Anne Frank obsession continues... he has a brief affair with a film star who had started her career playing Anne on the stage in Ireland.Volume 3 is `The Anatomy Lesson'. Nathan is 40 and an orphan now. He is plagued by guilt for the anguish that he had caused his parents. He is also plagued by excruciating unexplained pain and he lost the drive to write. He still has the sex drive, but can't have relationships. He becomes thoroughly unlikable and crazier by the day. He hits bottom when he travels to Chicago while on a cocktail of pain killers, vodka and pot. A core element of this third volume is a flood of vulgar rants that the drugged Zuckerman unleashes on strangers. He tries to redefine his life, start all over in a different world. Futile mid-life dreams.The Epilogue takes Nathan to Prague, where he meets writers with real world (political) problems, as opposed to his own (minor?) domestic issues of a Freudian nature. Does it cure him from his navel gazing? Yes. Nathan is 'normal' again.He meets a Czech writer in exile who asks him to help smuggle out manuscripts hidden in Prague.It is 1976 and Breshnev is still in full Stalinist glory. Oppression goes along with a dosis of anti- Semitism.But lest you anticipate a dour tale of politics, Roth bypasses your worries and finds an outrageous tone of satirical scorn. Scorn of the politics and amusement at the intellectuals with their bohemian antics. His tale of friends spying on each other is the funniest treatment of the subject that I remember.The LoA volume includes an additional text, a TV script based on the novella. It was written for BBC, but never produced. At the time, Roth was in a relation with a British actress who should have starred in it. Hanna Schygulla was supposed to play the other female role. It might have become a great film, but we will probably never know.I don't know Philip Roth well yet. I am so far much impressed by his imaginative word-smithing, though the semi- permanent focus on two main subjects might become tiring. The joys of being Jewish in America, and the troubles with sex might not be enough to keep me going for many more volumes. The Prague novella shows a way out of the hermitage.

Great used edition of a major work.

Outstanding trilogy from Philip Roth three novels bound into one book a great idea . One that favors the reader with three times the reading pleasure. They will surprise esecially the book about Ann Frank.The seller sold me a nearly new book for pennies. The book arrived like a premature baby, earlier than anticipated.

Philip Roth is always wonderful to read!

Three novels, as good as anything that's been published in many years, and better than most.