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

Roth’s words clarify both the internal logic governing the structure of My Life as a Man and the external one, that is to say, the biographical drive underlying the novel. Clearly enough, the fictional writing producing a Tarnopol has been useful to Roth as much as the fictional writing producing a Zuckerman has been useful to Tarnopol. The usefulness is both Tarnopol’s and Roth’s. As I have already suggested, this “usefulness” is the actual theme of the book.¹⁶ As Shechner suggested, “having Peter Tarnopol invent Nathan Zuckerman in ‘useful fictions’ that played extra variations of the theme of personal catastrophe was not just a way of flexing his muscles […]. It was his way of having art take up where therapy had left off and to do what therapy failed to do: produce usable fictions” (58). Redressing “the waste of […] youthful strength” through writing as a usable alternative to speaking about it on the psychoanalyst’s couch is at the center of the three male writers’ lives—Roth’s, Tarnopol’s, Zuckerman’s—here involved. The woman that Roth renames Josie in The Facts becomes Tarnopol’s Maureen Johnson in “My True Story” and Zuckerman’s Lydia Ketterer in “Courting Disaster.”

The bare essentials structuring these three narratives concern being tricked into marriage by a deceitful psychopathic woman who drains the vital sap of an otherwise self-confident budding literary talent. The differences between Tarnopol and Roth as “authors” and the ensuing narratological consequences concern the fact that Roth writes about the events retrospectively, well past the moment of bafflement and drainage and as a demonstration of his imaginative survival, whereas Tarnopol is still searching for a (literary) way out of the psychological quandary in the moment of narration. This temporal positioning allows Roth to project onto Tarnopol the obsessiveness of his subject and show the very process of dealing and struggling with it. The fictional world the reader encounters seems to be in progress while he is reading. “My True Story” is the book Tarnopol is trying to write: