Life and Art in Newark

...This Zuckerman, this "unbound" man-about-town...

...is as dangerous as a B'nai B' nth meeting...

...His brother hates him, his father is in post-stroke limbo in a Miami nursing home His mother plays canasta and waits for the end Nathan keeps a lonely apartment across the street from a high-society funeral parlor...

...LFE HBOOKS AND ART N NEV\ARK BY MAX APPLE ASA FICTION writer who makes public appearances, I find myself now and then called upon to explain to literary audiences why I like Philip Roth's work It is oneof the standard questions, the other is, "Do you understand Donald Barthelme''" The Barthelme question usually comes from a well-meaning would-be esthete, the Roth question from an angry Jew When I admit that I understand Barthelme and indeed admire Roth I seem to upset the crowd With taste like that I may not be the nice safe Jewish boy I seem to be in my own work You see, Philip, it's catching, you have even contaminated younger boys It'strue Art is a communicable disease, one book changes other books, sometimes the world But it is still a long way from the Industrial Revolution or Communism or even an angry parent Art touches with subtlety, the way Porlnoy's Complaint touches Roth's new novel Zuckerman Unbound (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 225 pp , $10 95) Portnoy is there, a great document of the past, but it's only connection to Zuckerman is our awareness of its historical reality Nathan Zuckerman doesn't need Alexander Port-noy's troubles, he has his own Zuckerman, author of the infamous Carnovsky, is adrift in Manhattan He is worth a million dollars, is mistaken for Sandy Koufax, has a pushy agent, and spends a night with an intellectual movie star He is estranged from a do-gooder wife and sees no old friends...

...He is merely a writer, but his imaginary creation Carnovsky lives a wholly different life Millions, after all, take Carnovsky to the beach, to the bathroom, to their very beds From them the novelist has no secrets, for that $ 1 95 paperback the reader gets Zuckerman too, and Zuckerman's whole family, ashamed that he didn't make his million like other men in dentistry or law Zuckerman lonesome, Zuckerman unaffected by his cash, Zuckerman between books and wives, this Zuckerman nobody sees, least of all Alvin Pepler, the "other" notorious Newark Jew of his generation Alvin meets Zuckerman in a delicatessen, nibbles at Zuckerman's sandwich and finally consumes it The crumbs of Zuckerman are all he gets, and in his heart Alvin is as jealous as Iago It is his story that he believes Zuckerman has "stolen" in Carnovsky " you stole it' From what my aunt Lottie told your cousm Essie that she told to your mother that she told to you About me About my past " Look what the world has done to Alvin For three weeks in the late 1950s he was famous, the master of Americana on Smart Money Then those ugly fates, the producers Schact-man and Bateman, decide to replace Alvin with a goy They have convinced the Jewish ex-Marine contestant that their show is part of the world of art " 'You have to have a plot, like in Hamlet, or anything else first-class You are artists Artists making art for America just the way Shakespeare made it in his day for England Does Hamlet get up from the stage and say I don't want to die at theendof the play7 No, his part is over and he lies there That is the difference, in point ot tact, between schlock and art Schlock goes every which way and couldn't care less about anything but the buck, and art is controlled, art is managed, art is alwavs rigged That is how it takes hold of the human heart '" Zuckerman Unbound is Pepler'sbook more than Zuckerman's Pepler insinuates himself into Nathan's imagination He has the power of anger and injustice He has been wronged, he was promised a j ob doing the Yankee radio broadcasts if he cooperated with the quiz show fix Alvin went along and his payola was a life of public disgrace Even his photographic memory cannot help him Zuckerman, affectedbyPepler's complaint, runs away from it Zuckerman's and Pepler's versions of what happened compete for primacy in the novel Such competition for the true version of a situation is a device Roth also used in The Ghost Writer, where Amy Bellette imagines herself Anne Frank In a 1974 story, "I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting,' Roth combined a biographical essay on the last year of Kafka's life with a story imagining Kafka surviving tuberculosis, the War, and the Holocaust to become his Hebrew school teacher in Newark The boys nicknamed the immigrant Dr Kishka There is about him something dumpy, European, foreign He lives alone in a "room "Roth'sfami-ly introduces him to Aunt Rhoda, an interior decorator at "The Big Bear " Kafka-Kishka, the survivor, and Aunt Rhoda, hungry for a life that has already passed her by, are an unlikely pair But how about Kafka in the last year of his life finally able to unburden himself from his father enough to fall in love7 How about Dora Dymant, ayoungJewish girl passionately invohed with this strange, dying, unknown writer7 Kafka surviving in Newark is no more unlikely than Kafka falling in love with Dora Dymant In the '40s and even the ' 50s the refugees were in all the Hebrew schools I had one in Michigan The same brown suit, the same hopelessness, but much less dignified than Dr Kishka My Mr Selhnger was probably only a physicist or a historian We hardly paid attention to him unless his false teeth slipped and crackled on his bad English Of course Kafka was Philip Roth's Hebrew school teacher, of course Carnovsky is really Alvin Pepler's story, who wouldn't steal it9 In the tanghngs of fiction the possible and impossible always mingle Is it possible that Zuckerman gave up his lovely Laura, the do-gooder wife so pure that only a priest can replace Zuckerman in her affections7 Is it true also that Zuckerman's father calls his son "bastard" in his dying breath7 Zuckerman and Pepler carom through the novel, one seeking to tell his story and the other facing the consequences of having told his The issue is what Smart Money producers labeled "the difference between schlock and art " Pepler, all schlock, attempts to blackmail Zuckerman Attacking the jugular of the nice Jewish boy, he threatens Zuckerman's mother "Have a heart, Zuck," the blackmailer says, "haven't you given her enough misery with that book7 I don't know a son in your financial position who would think twice about laying out fifty thousand to spare his mother some terrible tragic experience Suppose it was cancer would you make her go through that too rather than dig into the margin account7" Zuckerman, thinking art, wonders what Conrad, Tolstoy or Chekhov would do in this position before he realizes that it's "probably better to ask what Al Capone would do " Everything about Pepler is schlock, but the deep irony is that his life as he tells it, as he perceives the wrongs done to him, is all art He is a living novel or a Broadway musical perhaps, awaiting only the producer with the ear to hear him Pepler's knowledge of Americana is not fake "You should have seen me at my height, Nathan, what I was like for those three weeks I lived from Thursday to Thursday 'He's terrifying, he knows everything ' That's how they would introduce me on the show To them it was just more crapola to feed the idiot audience The tragedy is that it happened to be true And what I didn't know, I could learn " T JL...

...here was an "ear," the psychoanalyst's, to listen to Portnoy's complaint There is a world full of readers to listen to Zuckerman But who hears Alvin Pepler7 Roth has created the Jewish version of the criminal type, the assassin-blackmailer, the underground man as Jew Pepler is comic, hilarious, but his anger is intense and he is an ex-Marine, someone who knows about guns The blackmailer' s calls rightly disturb the novelist, the threat is real and never dismissed as Zuckerman's paranoia How can it be dismissed, Pepler himself defines the world ''' Newark'' Pepler, behind him, deli vered the word straight to the eardrum 'What do you know about Newark, Mama's Boy' Ireadthatfuckingbook' To you it's Sunday Chop Suey downtown at the Chink's' And Nick Etten at first forthe Bears' Nick Etten' Moron' Moron* Newark is a nigger with akmfe1 Newark is a whore with the syph' Newark lsjunkies shitting in your hallway and everything burned to theground' Newark is barbarian hordes and the Fall of Rome You fuck up Newark and you steal my life '" This is the hysterical voice of the unrecognized "genius, the mute inglorious" Pepler It is a terrifying voice, and there is the tension of a mystery story in parts of Zuckerman Unbound The novelist is afraid of the walking, living, story This fear leads Nathan to hire an armed chauffeur, who is waiting at Newark Airport as he returns from his father's funeral "The driver hiked up his jacket and unsnapped a holster hooked to his belt, a holster not much larger than an eyeglass case When they stopped for a light, he held up in his right hand a tiny handgun with a snub black barrel " 'What is art7' thought Zuckerman " Zuckerman, unbound from his father, enters the world of schlock, of plot, a world closer to a gun than Jewish boys should get Pepler's version of the world is closing in Zuckerman rides through his old Newark neighborhood "All he wanted at sixteen was to become a romantic genius like Thomas Wolfe and leave little New Jersey and all the shallow provincials therein for the deep emancipating world of Art As it turned out, he had taken them all with him " In the course of his career Roth has made his Newark Kafka's Prague, Babel's Odessa, Bellow's Chicago It is a universal city, a Jewish Troy The novelist driving off in his limousine has been taking us on one of the best rides in American literature...