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

matter, the second shows Roth (via Zuckerman) as a social novelist caring about history’s cultural minutiae who sets his characters’ individual biographies against crucial national junctures. Jewishness, the ever recurring Rothian theme, is thus explored both in (often) stifling familial precincts and the limited mentality of the tribe and set against a vaster national and transnational arena. Ethnic and religious group identification vies with class inclusion (and/or exclusion) to define the contours of one’s Jewish American identity.

Jewishness and authorship are addressed simultaneously in the book representing the turning point of the trajectory sketched here. The Counterlife, significantly placed on its own in the list of the Zuckerman books, constitutes the key to understanding the relationship between life and its fictional representation. The writer’s notebooks, marginally referred to in the Zuckerman Bound trilogy, here assume a central role by illuminating powerfully what it takes to be a writer in the way Roth is a writer. Here the initial frame, which had so far managed to integrate textual data, receives an (almost) fatal blow. The American trilogy can be fully understood only by remembering the games the writer plays with the reader in The Counterlife. Profoundly steeped in history, Seymour “The Swede” Levov, the brothers Ringold, and Coleman Silk are as much a product of their respective historical contexts as they are fruits of Zuckerman’s obsessive imagining, much as Maria and Carol and Henry are in The Counterlife. More marginal roles notwithstanding, the books of the second trilogy are in every sense Zuckerman’s.

The reader who has learned the lesson of The Counterlife knows how to recognize within the polished lines the authorial maneuvering which is characteristically the narrator’s (and the author’s). The textual details which will be used to pry open the inner fictional logic of each single book aim to show the continuities and changes of a lifelong working on the concepts and constructs of the Jewish American writer’s self.

“Things don’t have to reach a peak. They can just go on”—this is what happens in everyday life, maintains Maria in the “Gloucestershire” chapter of The Counterlife while discussing Zuckerman’s spending his