It's remarkable that Bellow, Styron, Malamud and Roth have all written novels in which the central character is a writer, more or less closely identifiable with the author whose name appears on the title-page. It's also rather interesting, to my mind, that all these writers are men; while they write about their problems as writers, women writers write about their problems as women. The American public, undeniably, receives these confessions with fascinated appetite, but it isn't axiomatic that a writer's life is of richer significance than the lives of the whaling captains or tobacco farmers chronicled in earlier American novels. In [The Anatomy Lesson], Zuckerman remarks: 'Other people. Somebody should have told me about them a long time ago.' It's slipped in as a casual, wry wisecrack, but it brings home with unintended sharpness the first serious limitation of this kind of novel.
There are other limitations, no less grave. Whereas a writer can observe a tobacco farmer with detachment, the primary condition of truth, he can't bring the same detachment to writing about himself—nor, it must be added sadly, to writing about rival novelists, editors or critics, who are described here with a malicious vengefulness that reduces long passages to the level of the snide gossip column. While Roth appears to be portraying Zuckerman with devastating frankness, the thoughtful reader is far from convinced that Zuckerman-Roth really is like this. He may be a better man or a worse, but the writer himself isn't the one to know. (pp. 27-8)
In fact, the crippling vice of the self-absorbed novel is its tone of unjustified self-importance. Roth's big commercial success was Portnoy's Complaint, an amusing novel which has dated considerably since it achieved a succès de scandale in 1968. Thousands of words in Zuckerman Unbound, and more thousands of words in The Anatomy Lesson, are taken up with the question of whether this book could be considered anti-Semitic. One might imagine that we are talking about The Merchant of Venice.
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