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

described or mentioned in enough details to suggest Roth’s life as their source” (54). The extensive fictive use of the author’s life reaches its acme with Nathan Zuckerman, significantly defined by Cooper as “Zuckerroth.”²

Born in Newark in 1933 into a Jewish American family of second-generation immigrants, Nathan Zuckerman is a writer who has to defend himself against accusations of anti-Semitism brought about by the reception of his first short stories. He becomes rich and notoriously famous thanks to Carnovsky, the irreverently explicit confessions of a young Jewish man thinking aloud while lying on a psychoanalyst’s couch. This very cursory description of Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman offers a mirror image, a little-altered alter ego having in common with Roth biographical detail after biographical detail—even to the point of Zuckerman sharing Roth’s habits of writing and his very fascination with masks: “I can only exhibit myself in disguise. All my audacity derives from masks” (TC 258). “Nathan [is] not only a writer, he [is] the writer whose public history [is] closest to Roth’s private history” (Cooper 210).

The innumerable contact points these two “biographies” share do not simply magnify the relationship between fiction and autobiography—a concern virtually all critics have recognized as lying at the very center of Roth’s aesthetic endeavor and which I address profusely in the following chapters. On a more profound level, they constitute Roth’s ambition to create a monument out of a specific well-individualized identity: the Jewish writer steeped in American history. Biographical truth and historiographical truth are masterfully interwoven in Roth’s portrait of himself as Zuckerman, the Jewish writer who traverses and penetrates historically crucial junctures spanning half a century while evolving as a writer through culturally recognizable stages: from sexual experimentation and annoyance with the strictures of the tribe, to the questioning of the contours of immigrant Jewish ethnoracial and religious identity and the attendant exploration of what assimilation and hyphenation are all about, to a detached stance concerning the absurdities and brutalities of modern society which call for special versions of human solidarity.