| Chapter 1: | The Making of Nathan Zuckerman |
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Chapter 1
The Making of
Nathan Zuckerman
A book is the writer’s secret life, the dark twin of a man:
you can’t reconcile them. And with you, when the inevitable
clash comes, the author’s actual self is the one that goes down,
for you are one of those for whom fact and fallacy gain
verisimilitude by being in cold print.
you can’t reconcile them. And with you, when the inevitable
clash comes, the author’s actual self is the one that goes down,
for you are one of those for whom fact and fallacy gain
verisimilitude by being in cold print.
—William Faulkner, Mosquitoes
1.1. My Life as a Man: “Useful” Zuckerman
My Life as a Man (1974) does not figure in the list of Zuckerman books. It is not, strictly speaking, a book featuring Zuckerman as, to use a Jamesian term, “a center of consciousness.” And yet, in order to trace the formal emergence of Nathan Zuckerman’s voice, My Life as a Man is where we must begin. Not only does the reader meet him here for the first time, but the narratological dynamics at stake here help to zoom in on Roth’s art of fiction, which features Zuckerman as a very important