Chapter 8 - The Zuckerman Books

Summary

Nathan Zuckerman is one of Roth’s most central characters, and any thorough study of Roth and his work requires an exploration of Zuckerman’s role in Roth’s development as a writer. In many ways, Roth’s career, his concerns, and his confrontation with illness and age, are reflected and refracted through Zuckerman, This chapter addresses the interpretation of Zuckerman as one of Roth’s “alter-egos”, from the time he first appears in 1974 in My Life as a Man, to his role in novels now collected as “Zuckerman Bound” [The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and The Prague Orgy (1985)] to The Counterlife (1986), and then the “American Trilogy”—American Pastoral (1997), I Married A Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)—before bidding farewell in 2007’s Exit Ghost.