AP News, September 27th, 2007
Philip Roth says he's done with Nathan Zuckerman. But is Nathan done with Philip Roth? "Goodbye, Nathan Zuckerman," the headline from Time magazine reads. Roth, the story declares, "has exhausted the possibilities of his character," the fictional adventurer of "The Ghost Writer," "The Anatomy Lesson" and other novels.
That was 1983. Nearly 25 years and several more Zuckerman books later, Roth says he's really finished with his most enduring protagonist. "Exit Ghost," in which Zuckerman confronts old age and the decline of his powers, is, the author insists, the final word on the imaginary novelist with the Roth-like career.
"I think so," Roth says when asked if Nathan is gone.
Think so?
"I KNOW so," he responds, with a laugh. "I mean this to be conclusive, because that was my intention, and, as far as I know, my intentions are honorable."
From the beginning, like a rebellious child, Nathan has never turned out as planned. Roth first thought of Zuckerman back in the 1970s, when he frequently visited Eastern Europe and became a champion of such Communist bloc dissidents as Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima.
An idea arose for a novel: to juxtapose the fates of a Western writer and an Eastern writer. Roth wrote a first draft, 200-300 pages. It wasn't working.
"I thought, `No no no no, this was too much stuff for too little space.' So I took it apart, and first I wrote `The Ghost Writer' (published in 1979) and finally worked my way down to `The Prague Orgy,'" he says, referring to the first and fourth of his Zuckerman books, the first four of which were just reissued by the Library of America.
Like Roth, Nathan is a New Jersey native famous for a scandalous novel ("Portnoy's Complaint" for Roth, "Carnovsky" for Nathan). Both are Jewish liberals born in the 1930s (Nathan is 71, Roth 74). Their affinity is so strong that when Roth wrote a memoir, "The Facts," Nathan was given the final word, urging his creator not to publish the book.
"You are far better off writing about me than `accurately' reporting your own life," Nathan advises.
The appeal of Nathan, Roth explains, is that "certain characters give you room to do certain things." You couldn't blame Nathan for wishing that someone else had the honors: He has suffered writer's block, impotency and the scorn of his family. In the mid-1990s, Roth kicked Nathan upstairs, restricting him to the status of "listener" in "American Pastoral," winner of the Pulitzer Prize and centered on the brother of one of Nathan's high school classmates.
"What happened with `American Pastoral' was that I decided to give him (Nathan) prostate cancer," says Roth, interviewed recently at the offices of his agent, Andrew Wylie.
"At the time I was thinking about writing the book, it seemed every third friend of mine had come down with this blight, and there were so many men struggling with this thing and it was so awful. And I thought, `Well, I will make him a member of his generation."
After minor roles for Nathan in "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain," Roth "thought it was over" again for his character. But as he began work on a novel about a man being treated for the effects of prostate surgery, he realized that man was Nathan, and the book became "Exit Ghost."
In "The Facts," Nathan lectures Roth on the perils of mixing life and literature. "My guess is that you've written metamorphoses of yourself so many times," Roth's character observes, "you no longer have any idea what you are or ever were. By now what you is a walking text."
Numerous books include close parallels to his own life, from his marriage to actress Claire Bloom, whom he eventually divorced, to his childhood in Newark. Roth not only dismisses as "irrelevant" any similarities, but denies even the intention of making readers believe they're reading about him, even in books that feature a character named "Philip Roth."
"When you're writing, you're throwing it all in your dream machine," he says, "And you're throwing whatever is handy and what is useful to you. And by the time when I'm finished writing the book, I don't know whether something is drawn from life or not. It's been remade."
Compared to other Roth characters, including Peter Tarnapol ("My Life as a Man") and "Philip Roth" ("Operation Shylock," "The Plot Against America"), Zuckerman is actually the farthest from the author, who was adored by his parents and consistently produces a novel a year.
In "Exit Ghost," Roth allows Nathan to write his own escape, or at least lets readers believe it's Nathan wanting out. Nathan has met a young woman with whom he becomes infatuated. Unable to seduce her in real life, (the novel's "real life"), he instead tries to write a fictional conquest, fails again and runs.
"Thus, with only a moment's more insanity on his part _ a moment's more insanity on his part _ a moment of insane excitement _ he throws everything into his bag ... and gets out as fast as he can," Roth-Nathan writes.
Nathan has left, "for good." And Roth's well into another novel, without him.
