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

reader, making it necessary to pose questions and attempt to find answers in order to refine presuppositions and the interpretative frame being used; second, they reflect and refract the very identity of the mask through which Roth has chosen to look at the world. These details turn out to have a representational quality because they constitute a high-resolution space, condensing motives and concerns retraceable on Roth’s vaster fictional horizon. The detail is not a textual fragment gone haywire, but the very locus qualifying what goes into the act of writing—rhetorically and culturally. It encodes a practice that can be decoded. As a zipped file, it may be unzipped to reveal and provide critical trajectories.

The detail shows in compressed form the ways in which fictions are consciously composed and built. Furthermore, it places the reader closer to the very source of its creation. Interestingly enough, this “vantage point” turns out to be uncomfortable. The proximity to the creative moment does not help the reader to clarify narratological matters. Indeed, it eventually leads to bafflement. At times, the interpretation of the detail leads to narratological irresolution. These blind spots and inconsistencies, far from demonstrating Roth’s awkward handling of an overly long plot line, bring out the very core of his art of fiction—tightrope walking, here and there winking at postmodern choices and devices, maintaining a clear anchoring in the realistic code¹¹ and in the life of the author (as opposed to the death of the author). In this hide-and-seek game made up of realistic descriptions and postmodern denials, Roth via Zuckerman always wins, but readers are not sorry to lose.

As Roth’s most cherished mask, Nathan Zuckerman provides the reader with a window into the crucial issue of authorship and on the range of Roth’s thematic preoccupations. In the nine-book overall movement from self to history, from the young writer’s egotistic self-absorption to his mature focalization on others, a thematic route is detectable. Within the microcosm of the Zuckerman books, Roth incorporates themes that are explored in his other non-Zuckerman books. Whereas the thematic trajectory of the first trilogy might be considered to span from unmitigated sexual urge and imaginative total indulgence to physical incapacity and the loss of one’s subject