Odd Jobs (68 page)

PHILIP ROTH

Z
UCKERMAN
U
NBOUND
, by Philip Roth. 225 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981.

In this episodic sequel to
The Ghost Writer
, the fledgling writer Nathan Zuckerman now struggles with the wealth, fame, intrusions, and estrangements bestowed upon him by the enormous success of his fourth novel,
Carnovsky
. Zuckerman’s parents, his thoroughly Jewish Newark, his discardable shiksa consorts, his pangs of guilt and impatience, his love for the classics of Western thought, and his fondness for Forties trivia may be already familiar to chronic readers of Mr. Roth, who has evolved from the broad-shouldered realist of
Letting Go
, the frenzied fantasist of
The Great American Novel
, and the unbuttoned psychodramatist of
Portnoy’s Complaint
into something of an exquisitist, moving, in his last four novels, among his by now highly polished themes with ever more expertness and care. The comic diatribes seem almost engraved, they are so finely tuned, and the polarities between id and superego, Jew and goy, artistic honesty and human decency are as beautifully played upon as the themes in a Bach fugue. Always one of the most intelligent and energetic of American authors, Roth has now become one of the most scrupulous, and the grateful, amused, enlightened reader would be a churl indeed if he complained at the narrowing, almost miniaturized, scope of Roth’s bejewelled and frisky world.

Warning: this short work, already thoroughly pre-published by a trio of magazines, bears on its jacket flaps a plot summary almost as long and
gratuitous as a master’s thesis. Ignore it or forfeit all surprises, pleasant and unpleasant.

T
HE
A
NATOMY
L
ESSON
, by Philip Roth. 291 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983.

Nathan Zuckerman, the hero of Philip Roth’s new novel, has been met by faithful Roth-readers twice before. In
The Ghost Writer
(1979), as a twenty-three-year-old just-published writer, he visited the Berkshire home of the revered older author E. I. Lonoff; Zuckerman had lately composed a short story entitled “Higher Education,” based on some family incidents, which had occasioned his father considerable unhappiness and produced an unctuous letter and questionnaire from the highly respected Newark judge Leopold Wapter. Judge Wapter’s concluding questions were:

And:

Lonoff (who died in 1961; this episode occurred in the Fifties) had his own hands full with a frolicsome houseguest who may have been really Anne Frank. But he took a moment to reassure Zuckerman that niceness is not of the essence in being a writer, and, demonstrating the social embarrassments of creativity, galloped off in pursuit of his wife, Hope, who had just decamped “in search of a less noble calling.” By the time of
Zuckerman Unbound
(1981), our ethically troubled young writer had suppressed
his desire to please the respectable Jewish citizens of Newark long enough to produce an uninhibited novel,
Carnovsky
, which in the scope of its success and scandal can be compared only to Mr. Roth’s own
Portnoy’s Complaint
. Success brought its misadventures, of which the most distressing was Zuckerman’s father, on his deathbed, calling his son a “bastard.” Nathan’s younger brother, Henry, confirmed the epithet in a sudden diatribe as they, having buried their father, parted at the Newark airport:

The Anatomy Lesson
finds Zuckerman mired ever deeper in his ill-gotten gains and the problems of conscience posed by Judge Wapter’s questions and Henry’s accusations. The time is 1973, Watergate time, and Zuckerman watches Nixon on television—“the dummy gestures, the satanic sweating, the screwy dazzling lies”—with fellow-feeling, for the President is “the only other American he saw daily who seemed to be in as much trouble as he was.” Watches him, it should be explained, through prism glasses, for Zuckerman is flat on his back with excruciating, mysterious, undiagnosed, and uncured neck and shoulder pains. “Just having a neck, arms, and shoulders was like carrying another person around.” He cannot walk more than a few blocks at a time, lift grocery bags or open windows, cook or make his bed or write. He has three ex-wives, four mistresses, and is furious with a critic, Milton Appel, who has spoken and written unkindly of his work. To kill the pain he takes Percodan, drinks vodka, and smokes marijuana, all in increasing quantities. He gradually comes to think that what he really wants, at the age of forty, is to be a doctor; in order to enroll in medical school he travels, heavily self-medicated, to Chicago, where he was once a happy student. But happiness is not so easily come by for Nathan Zuckerman now. With the help of Percodan he attains new heights of self-analysis and self-abasement, as his spirit apparently craves.

The Anatomy Lesson
is a ferocious, heartfelt book. Materials one might have thought exhausted by Roth’s previous novelistic explorations, inflammations one might have thought long soothed burn hotter than ever; the central howl unrolls with a meditated savagery both fascinating and repellent, self-indulgent yet somehow sterling, adamant, pure in the style of high modernism, that bewitchment to all the art-stricken young of the Fifties. Zuckerman’s admonition to himself, “Drive pain out with your battering heart the way a clapper knocks sound from a bell,” could come straight from Kafka. Beckett also figures in: “Percodan was to Zuckerman what sucking stones were to Molloy.” Writing has been his life and religion: “He used to wonder how all the billions who didn’t write could take the daily blizzard—all that beset them, such a saturation of the brain, and so little of it known or named. If he wasn’t cultivating hypothetical Zuckermans he really had no more means than a fire hydrant to decipher his existence.” But this cultivation of hypothetical selves has become an endgame:

Zuckerman wants out of his weary, overannotated, aching self; but, “if Zuckerman wrote about what he didn’t know, who then would write about what he did know?” The postmodernist writer’s bind is expressed in flat authoritative accents reminiscent of Hemingway’s unbuttoned late-night letters: “If you get out of yourself you can’t be a writer because the personal ingredient is what gets you going, and if you hang on to the personal ingredient any longer you’ll disappear right up your asshole.” Zuckerman is willing to sacrifice his writerly vocation; to be a harried emergency-room doctor promises “an end to the search for the release from self.” He thinks, “Other people. Somebody should have told me about them a long time ago.” Ministering to the pain of others promises release from personal discomfort. “Had he kept a pain diary, the only entry would have been one word: Myself.”

A text so self-aware and self-referential suggests the torture-machine of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” which inscribed, over and over, an
unintelligible lesson upon the victim’s skin. As well as tireless superscription a constant flanking motion seems in progress; the repeated self-indictments leave the critic little to say. One can scarcely complain of the novel’s frenzied solipsism when frenzied solipsism is its chosen and announced topic. One should certainly not confuse Zuckerman’s creator—the gracious and generous-spirited editor of a Penguin series devoted to the undervalued writers of Eastern Europe, a man who wears with an exemplary dignity and reserve the American writer’s motley—with the abject Zuckerman himself, who differs from Philip Roth in as many biographical particulars as he happens to share. (Zuckerman has in twenty years of work produced a meagre four books, as contrasted with Roth’s baker’s dozen. Zuckerman has had three wives, Roth only one. Zuckerman’s father has died; Roth’s, as of 1983, flourishes.) One might venture to say that, like a goodly number of Roth’s previous works,
The Anatomy Lesson
revolves around the paradox of incarnation—the astonishing coexistence in one life of infantilism and intelligence, of selfishness and altruism, of sexual appetite and social conscience—and has the form and manner of a monologue conducted under psychoanalysis, whose termination in this case seems premature.

Portnoy, at least, in arriving by way of strenuous sexual pilgrimage at a state of impotence in Israel, brought his complaint to a climax from which, as the intruding psychiatric voice at the end proclaimed, we might begin. Zuckerman, at the end of his trilogy, seems, though battered by some circumstances, still unimpaired in his basic mechanisms; his basic astonishment at being a person, once he gets his breath back, will continue to feed his indignation and ravenous rage of discourse, of “self-conscious self-miming.” He is free from neither his pain nor his vocation, if I read correctly the novel’s last, rather Jamesian sentence. Nothing, amid all the verbal fury, has happened, any more than David Kepesh, at the end of
The Breast
, ceased to be a breast. This unforgettable novella was published in 1972, in the era when
The Anatomy Lesson
takes place. Like the present work,
The Breast
begins with an inexplicable somatic assault—not incapacitating neck pains but a “massive hormonal influx” that in a night of “agony” (“as though I were being repeatedly shot from a cannon into a brick wall”) transformed a young professor of English into a six-foot-long breast with the end without a nipple “rounded off like a watermelon.” Both works seek resolution in an orgiastic vision: the giant breast intends to be constantly caressed by naked twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls, “greedy wicked little girls,
licking me and sucking me to my heart’s content,” and Zuckerman in Chicago reels off to his female chauffeur an extensive Dionysian fantasy about being a pornography king named, by a weird blow of his drug-loosened mind, Milton Appel.
The Breast
, following upon the best-selling
Portnoy
, baffled many readers, but has improved with age, and was honored by its author, in 1980, with a revision of its text. Comparing the two
Breasts
, this reader detected little improvement—just rearrangements of elements within paragraphs, a diminishing of academic satire in connection with the character named Arthur Schonbrunn, and a subtle overlay of commas and dashes, producing a slightly more professorial tone. The fable’s inner meaning has been softened and blurred at spots; in the first version, Kepesh cries out in his agony of immobility and blindness,

This
cri de sein
was much shortened in the later version, and on the next page the descriptive phrase “spasms of illogic or infantilism” deleted. But infantilism is certainly what it is all about; Roth’s message, driven home in book after book, is what infants men are. The infant, Freud has told us, is the prototypical human being, the fundamental stewpot: a “cocky little ogre,” according to Auden (in “Mundus et Infans”), and, according to Wordsworth, heavenly spirit freshly planted in the flesh. Habituation dulls us to the “relentless nightmare” of our embodiment; but essentially it is no more grotesque to be conscious within an enormous breast than within the body one
does
have, with its hair and fingernails and teeth, its symmetrical limbs and asymmetrical internal organs. The helpless infant in his deep discomfiture limitlessly
wants
, as David Kepesh slung in his hammock wants, as Nathan Zuckerman wants while he lies immobilized on a playmat he has bought “in a children’s furniture store on Fifty-seventh Street.” As our hero lies on his playmat, his head supported by a thesaurus his father had given him with the inscription “From Dad—You have my every confidence,” his four mistresses come and lower their orifices upon him. Kepesh’s dream of attentive “greedy
wicked little girls” has come true, with some unforeseen wrinkles; but still Zuckerman, sucking and sucked, is not satisfied; he wants the real thing, the original mother lowering her breasts upon him. “Zuckerman finally realized that his mother had been his only love.” When she dies, in Florida, he takes away from her effects an old book of hers called
Your Baby’s Care;
on the page headed “Feeding,” which prescribes emptying the breast by hand every twenty-four hours, he finds a stain that he believes to have been left by a drop of her milk, expressed in 1933, and he closes his eyes and puts his tongue to the dry page. Adult infantilism can go no further.