Whatever else a story may do, its one indispensable element is the imagination's first premise: what if?… What if a petty clerk in Prague should awaken one morning to find that he has become an enormous insect, or what if Franz Kafka himself should survive his bout with tuberculosis in 1924, live long enough to have to flee the Nazis, and emigrate to Newark, N.J., just in time to become Philip Roth's Hebrew schoolteacher? Such is the premise of what is surely Roth's finest piece of short fiction, "'I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting'; or, Looking at Kafka."…
Here is an example of the writer pushing his premises as far as he can until some other consideration, some reality principle, pushes back. Franz Kafka can be kept alive long enough to get to Newark, but he can't be restored to confident sexual manhood…. To suppose otherwise might make a good story, but it would be about another man, not Kafka. Take another example: What if Anne Frank could have survived the Holocaust and emigrated to America to become a student—a coed—at a small college near Stock-bridge, Mass.? And what if, some years later, she should meet up with Nathan Zuckerman, a young writer from Newark, who is about Roth's age and is currently in hot water throughout Essex County because of a story he has written, featuring his own family, that is taken to be anti-Semitic? Stop there. The difficulties are immediately obvious. Anne Frank can't be reinvented like Franz Kafka. Kafka was so wholly of the imagination that it remains his medium even after his death, but Anne Frank belongs to history, and to a history so tragic and irredeemable that the imagination has to feel a little chastened before it. But what if our Zuckerman, whose fantasy life sometimes overpowers him as it should in a writer, were only to imagine that a young woman he meets might be Anne Frank, and that for his own personal motives that is just another reason to fall in love with her? Then you have Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, a book about how Anne Frank might be invented by a young man who has need of imagining her.
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