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

In the final pages of The Counterlife, Zuckerman spells out the core of the act of impersonation: “it’s all impersonation—in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through” (300). Zuckerman’s is the self that helps Roth the most in getting himself through; it is the cornerstone in the construction of “Philip Roth.” As Parrish summarized perceptibly, “for Roth, the self is fiction; hence, he understands narrative form and personal identity to be in reciprocal relation” (Companion 130). Zuckerman is a one-man show that condenses issues such as authorship and authority (narrative form) and the place of the (Jewish) writer in history (personal identity). The continuities and physical progress of Nathan Zuckerman’s living body allow for both identity in time and change—from youthful exuberance to impotence and old age—and the simultaneous disclosure of a poetics. Each stage of Zuckerman’s development helps to zoom in and illuminate the tools of Roth’s trade—impersonation and the consequent experimentation with pronominal shifts, ambiguity in the attribution of the source of discourse, and manipulation of the order of presentation through the interplay of the “experiencing ‘I’ ” and the “narrating ‘I’ ” perspectives. Zuckerman makes the lived time of history and the lived experience of an author available for representation. But how is this identity shaped? How does narrative technique interact with biographical data? How does the reader make (progressive) sense of Zuckerman?

Before discussing how this book will answer these questions, it is important to clarify a number of interrelated issues constituting the critical foundations of what follows. The backbone of the analysis I present consists of a reading of Nathan Zuckerman across multiple narratives in order to unearth biographical interconnections and trace the portrait of the Rothian artist. Shostak implicitly endorsed this choice when she said that “it’s appropriate to think of Nathan’s movement through time” (Royal, “A Roundtable” 9), but the stakes of an intertextual reading need to be qualified at the outset. I have already stressed how intertextual reading stems from Roth’s own paratextual choice. As Shostak suggested, “the highlighting of the books’ voices by name reveals Roth’s interest in retrospectively finding patterns” (Countertexts 10). Roth’s “finding