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

ingredient. The actual wording “art of fiction” is such a recurring phrase as to become a central theme of the novel. It is no coincidence that Nathan Zuckerman begins to take shape in the folds of these theoretical reflections.

As Smith suggested, “the novel artfully explores the carefully created artifice of its own narrative strategy” (81). Right from the start, in fact, Roth’s 1974 book touches upon metanarrative notes explicitly. To get to the title of the first part of the book and the narrative proper, the reader has to cross multiple thresholds. The epigraph “To Aaron Asher and James Epstein” is followed by “A Note to the Reader” that reads as follows: “The two stories in part I, ‘Useful Fictions,’ and part II, the autobiographical narrative ‘My True Story,’ are drawn from the writings of Peter Tarnopol” (381). A second epigraph follows: “I could be his Muse, if only he’d let me. —Maureen Johnson Tarnopol, from her diary.”

This multilayered paratext¹² announces and epitomizes what lies ahead. First, this textual space stages the collapse and/or the conflation of the notions of author/character and fiction/reality. Second, Peter Tarnopol, and not Nathan Zuckerman, is the mask Roth uses in My Life as a Man. Finally, and crucially, Tarnopol is a writer who happens to be keen on masking practices. No wonder the habit of reading Roth’s work, autobiographically culminating with Nathan Zuckerman, began with recognizing in Tarnopol’s biography a number of details corresponding to the publicly known facts of the author’s life.¹³ The first epigraph and “A Note to the Reader” excluded, nowhere else in the whole book can an authorial presence distinguishable from Tarnopol’s be detected.¹⁴ This holds true even in that the title of the book itself challenges any easy referential link between the first-person possessive adjective and the person it refers back to.¹⁵ As with the other elements of the paratext, the title stages microscopically the core of the text that follows; namely, the relationship between the author and his masks (who?) and between the author and his materials (what? and how?). In My Life as a Man, Roth invites the reader to focus his attention on the distinction between a “real” event and its fictional and imaginative rendering. Because the