In his inimitably wholehearted way, Roth has let success go to his head. Success arrived there in 1980, with a big suitcase, and hasn’t moved out. The Anatomy Lesson may be the third and final instalment of the Zuckerman trilogy, but it is also Roth’s second consecutive novel about what success is like. Such fixity! Though they all want it, in a way, writers tend to be mistrustful of the ridiculous accident of bestsellerdom. Trust Roth, then, to embrace it as his subject. Completing the self-beleaguerment, he has now written two autobiographical novels about the consequences of writing autobiographical novels. I may be wrong (perhaps I’m very old-fashioned), but the question appears to me to be: do we need this new kind of autobiographical novel? I mean, we seemed to begetting on pretty well without it.
Whereas a British work on literary success would be rather low on incident (do radio interview; have lunch with publisher; get boiler mended), it is true that the American version provides considerable drama… You become a millionaire. You are mobbed in the street. Pale ‘loners’ have your picture tacked to the dartboard. Gossip columnists pair you off with Liza Minelli. Your sexual confessions increase the sale of pantihose, nationwide. PR firms want your mother to star in their rollmop commercials. Bestsellerdom rips the hard covers off life, because ‘everyone has read that book’. In Roth’s quasi-fictional world, that book is called ‘Carnovsky’. We know it as Portnoy’s Complaint, and we’ve all read it too.
Starting with the premonitory novella The Ghost Writer, moving on through the fame-flurry of Zuckerman Unbound, Roth now confronts the aftermath of literary success. Despite the ‘trilogy’ tag, you often wonder whether they aren’t simply three books running with the same hero: Roth’s post-Portnoy alter egos are so uniform that you could argue for a full pentathlon, roping in The Professor of Desire and My Life as a Man. The Zuckerman novels, at any rate, have no plot and little patterning. The Anne Frank motif from The Ghost Writer, for instance, is briefly taken up in Zuckerman Unbound, yet nothing of the first book survives into the third — nothing, that is to say, of artistic centrality.
Zuckerman is there, Aunt Essie is there, but structure is not there. You get joists, braces, buttresses (a skipful of teachabilities): you don’t get a house. The books have a shape, that of the case history. Although the author may feign weary contempt for any Roth-Zuckerman equations, it must be said that the novels read like experience. Experience reworked, displaced, mordantly heightened — but not distanced, and not transformed.
The Roth themes, or reiterations, are compelling enough, and they are intricately deployed. Nathan Zuckerman’s disaffection with the writer’s calling has now reached the point where he is blocked, drugged, drunk and practically bedridden, assailed by ‘untreatable pain of unknown origin’ which makes writing physically as well as mentally unendurable. His persecution at the hands of the Jewish establishment continues, though in more highbrow form. Rabbi Wapter from The Ghost Writer has evolved into Professor Milton Appel (a nasty Commentary type), whose more sophisticated disapproval takes the same basic line: the charge of self-loathing anti-Semitism, as evinced in that ‘mocking, hate-filled bestseller’ with its lewd satire on Jewish ideals, sentiments and terrors. This is particularly hard on Zuck, whose pre-‘Carnovsky” image was one of crew-necked maturity and high seriousness. But his most stinging excruciations come from guilt, and from a transgression that lies much closer to home.
The guilt theme appeared to have peaked out at the end of Zuckerman Unbound, when the hero’s father died with the word ‘Bastard’ on his lips after reading ‘Carnovsky’ in hospital. ‘You killed him,’ confirmed Zuckerman’s brother. ‘With that book.’ In The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman pins his mother’s death on ‘Carnovsky’ too. The loved son inflicted a fatal wound on his mother: ‘literature is literature, but still, there were things that were real that Nathan has used’ — used, with the additional sense of violation and betrayal. Interestingly, his guilt is never for a moment identified as literary. There are literary reasons, after all, for not ‘using’ real things, including oneself, without some countervailing broadness of vision or design. Zuckerman never blames himself as a writer. He blames himself, and he blames writing, but never both at once.