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

Chapter 1:  The Making of Nathan Zuckerman
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In the meantime, with or without Tarnopol presiding over the text, the reader is ushered into the storyworld by the presentation of the familial world surrounding a yet only partially named new character:

First, foremost, the puppyish, protected upbringing above his father’s shoe store in Camden. Seventeen years the adored competitor of that striving, hot-headed shoedog (that’s all, he liked to say, a lowly shoedog, but just you wait and see), a man who gave him Dale Carnegie to read so as to temper the boy’s arrogance, and his own example to inspire and strengthen it. “Keep up that cockiness with people, Natie, and you’ll wind up a hermit, a hated person, the enemy of the world—” (385)

This incipit goes a long way in creating what Perry calls “a perceptual set” (50) in the reader’s mind. It establishes the idea of a precise familial setup which will be perfected in the two pages that follow: a formidable father, Mr. Z., a devoted mother who tends to praise her children excessively, and two sons, the younger of which—Natie—needs to read Dale Carnegie to temper his arrogance lest it ruin his (social) future. But “first, foremost” the reader is told about Natie’s deeply entrenched perception of living in a protecting and adoring environment:

Twice his father had gone bankrupt in the years between the wars. […] Business crumbled, but never the household, because never the head of the house. During those bleak years of scarcity and hardship, little Nathan hadn’t the faintest idea that his family was trembling on the brink of anything but perfect contentment, so convincing was the confidence of that volcanic father. And the faith of the mother. (387)

The confidence of the volcanic father, who looks very much like Lou Levov, takes the Zuckermans past the bankrupt years to the boom years when “a brand new ‘Mr.Z.’ shoe store [opens] out at the two-million-dollar Country Club Hills Shopping Mall” (387). By then, Nathan is entering high school with a past characterized by “anything but perfect contentment.” Nathan emerges in these first pages against the backdrop of an exceptionally sustaining Jewish family, which might be the