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Art as Impersonation of Oneself
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11742 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1987 |
9,377 Words |
| Author
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Bernard Rodgers
Bernard Rodgers is vice president and dean of Simon's Rock
College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His most
recent book is Voices and Visions: Selected Essays (2001). |
By now the spectrum of critical reactions to a new novel by Philip Roth has become predictable. Ever since his debut with Goodbye, Columbus, Roth has had more than his share of both avid admirers and vehement detractors. So with each new book battle lines are again drawn, arguments are again marshaled, and the controversy begins anew. To some, The Counterlife will be one more example of why Roth has been one of America's more interesting and accomplished novelists: the author of a distinguished series of works marked by their blend of comedy and seriousness, their distinctive voice and persistent vision, their attention to craft, and their psychological insight. To others, his latest novel will demonstrate why he has always seemed wildly overrated: a self-hating, self-indulgent, self-centered, sex-obsessed, and vulgar entertainer. Over the last decade his detractors have added another charge - repetitiveness - and have demanded that he abandon his fictional alterego, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, whom they see as the product of an increasingly boring narcissism. Some critics have even urged that he kill Zuckerman off so that he can get on to other things.
Roth has been extremely sensitive to such attacks - in fact, responding to them is clearly one of the sparks that has consistently ignited his creativity - and the novels he has written over the past decade have put fictionalized versions of both those attacks and his rebuttals to them at their center. At the beginning of The Counterlife, he seems to have responded to his critics once again, since the main character appears to be Nathan's brother Henry, rather than Nathan himself. And midway through the novel, he seems to go even further: Nathan Zuckerman dies. But in his extraordinary novel, where turning a page often means encountering a new beginning, Zuckerman doesn't stay dead. In a twist as audacious as anything Philip Roth has done, he brings Nathan back to life, twice, before The Counterlife ends.
This twist really shouldn't surprise us. After all, Roth has appeared to be finished with Nathan Zuckerman at least three times before, only to resurrect him when it has suited his artistic purpose. After introducing him in the first two sections of My Life as a Man, he turned to another hero, Peter Tarnopol, in the last section of that book; and to yet another, David Kepesh, in his subsequent novel, The Professor of Desire. In his next two books, The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman returned. When The Anatomy Lesson appeared, it was billed as the finale of the "Zuckerman trilogy," only to be succeeded by Zuckerman's return in the epilogue to the trilogy, "The Prague Orgy." Zuckerman Bound - which collected The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound,
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