Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld ...

choice stems from the conviction that the manipulation of this order constitutes the most notable feature of the inner logic of Zuckerman’s fictional world. Be it the presentation of Tarnopol’s “true story” and its fictionalization in reverse order in My Life as a Man, or the deferred revelation of Coleman Silk’s racial identity in The Human Stain, to cite two keynote cases, Roth showed that he was perfectly aware of the effect that a deft handling of the temporal dimension of literature can have on the reader. Wearing the shoes of a first-time reader helps to highlight these looked-for effects in a better way. I am not advocating a naïve reading, but proposing an analysis based upon a “conscious reconstruction of [a] naïve reading” (Perry 357).

Who stands behind the ambiguous pronominal shifts in My Life as a Man? How can one guess the subtle game a young Nathan is playing on the reader in The Ghost Writer? What kind of “unconstrained fantasies” can a book provoke? How does Nathan eventually overcome the crippling pain he describes in The Anatomy Lesson? What is the status of Zuckerman’s notebooks, the centrality of which is repeatedly, if indirectly, hinted at in almost all the Zuckerman books? Why does Nathan’s English wife Maria disappear from the fictional place he shared with her husband in The Counterlife, only to reappear fleetingly in the frame of an autobiographical writing and then disappear for good? Why do the Swede’s second wife’s name and religion both remain undefined? Why is Nathan (almost) invisible as a writer in I Married a Communist? What kind of “passing” is Coleman Silk’s? Why do the memorable protagonists of the American trilogy seem not to have existed in the recapitulation of the closing act—Exit Ghost? All in all, which books has Zuckerman written?

These exemplifying questions, each condensing one of the details this book tries to highlight, might strike the reader as both arbitrary and random, bespeaking a fragmentary method, or failing to provide a sequential critical account of all there is at stake in the Zuckerman books. My commitment to textual particularity stems from the conviction that the details I am speaking of might at first appear to be oddly marginal and negligible, but they are far from being irrelevant. First, they torment the