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

Nine books all in all: a quartet comprised a trilogy and an epilogue, a self-standing book, a second trilogy, and what I might provisionally term a final epilogue. A very cursory look at the dates of publication shows how the narrative plot presenting Zuckerman’s biography does not form a monolithic whole. The narrowness of my chosen focus justifies the bypassing of the eleven years between The Counterlife and the first installment of the so-called American trilogy, which features five (non-Zuckerman) books, and the seven years separating the closing of that trilogy from Zuckerman’s last narrative effort, which saw the publication of three other non-Zuckerman novels. Similarly, the selective ratio here applied allows for an enlargement of the list of books included in my analysis to comprise My Life as a Man (1974) and The Facts (1988), for the rather simple reason that Nathan Zuckerman is present in both of them in ways crucial to the overall assessment of his function in Roth’s canon. My Life as a Man inaugurates the masking practice that will become central to Roth’s oeuvre, testing the distancing effects a mask allows, and the five autobiographical chapters framed by an epistolary exchange between Roth and Zuckerman that make up The Facts show that fictionalization is unmistakably what a novelist’s life is made of.

In the interstitial space between his very first appearance in My Life as a Man and his full-blown portrait in The Ghost Writer, Nathan Zuckerman is crucially reshaped and acquires new narrative functions. This first strategic refashioning, which requires a crucial redefinition of the original frame the reader builds on encountering Zuckerman for the first time, gives rise to a number of interrelated questions: What kind of rewriting does Zuckerman go through? Is his presentation simply developmental in the sense that it follows a trajectory from the not yet accomplished