Zuckerman at the End of the Line

...In an implausible denouement that indicates Roth had better settle for being literal rather than imaginative, Zuckerman lashes out at the old man, crashes into a tombstone, bursts his chin, and is detoxified and eased back to health at Bobby's hospital...

...He tries to imagine a Polish past for his own stories...

...But for most of us Zuckerman's extravagant passion merits no mark between A and F; as with the essay of the student in Lionel Trilling's unforgettable story, "Of This Time, Of That Place," the only mark that will do is M for Mad...

...If Roth ever recovers his capacity for such admiration, if he opens his fiction to characters he can respect, or at least does not dare to disdain, his talent may be willing to get back in tune with him...

...Well, I'll show you what real pornography is-it's all around you...

...In a recent Washington Post interview, Roth said he felt that everything up to now had been apprentice work...

...In the present volume she has recently died, and Zuckerman, rummaging among her orderly knitting instructions and appreciative mementos of himself, hears that she taught the widowers in the Florida condominium to fold their towels, that she and her black maid always hugged and kissed when they met...

...More to the point: Suppose there had been no demolishing reconsiderations and he had never heard a discouraging word about his Jewish characters-what in the world would the Zuckerman trilogy be about...

...Unlike John Updike, who writes with all six senses, Roth beholds the world with a restless kibitzer's eye, rather than an artist's, and has passed up a great deal in his surroundings...

...Here member show.as a widow.she would say to the waitress, "My husband loved ocean scallops...

...You are a good soldier," Zuckerman's friend Ivan Felt tells him...

...Zuckerman is dead tired of "self-mining," totally at a loss for material...

...How much of his own experience, however, has Roth actually used up to now...

...Your solitude is of your own making," says Bobby, a straightforward, well-disposed man (and a throwback to friendships in the old-fashioned conventional novel whose proprieties Roth has been so eager to renounce...

...He has come to Chicago with the unlikely ambition of giving up his calling and enrolling in medical school, and implores Bobby, now a successful anesthesiologist, to help him train for a less isolating profession...

...Can we be certain that Roth is being honest with himself...

...I feel I'm in charge now, in tune with my talent...

...So far, the novels of Philip Roth have gotten mileage out of registering pain, rather than taking pains with the dilemmas of real experience...

...Repulsive in the extreme, Rolb's Hustler act is nonetheless perfect in its mimicry, its radar for a cast of mind that must be alien to a disciplined, essentially puritanical writer like himself...

...During the three volumes we spend in Zuckerman's company, we are mainly briefed on his misfortunes, his martyrdom as man and writer...

...the elan with which he wields his most potent fictional strategy, the accusatory monologue, preposterous in its near-hysteria but guaranteed to keep the reader awake...

...All of them full of sympathy suddenly for the ghetto world of their traditional fathers, now that the traditional fathers are filed for safekeeping in Beth Moses Memorial Park...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp Whatever the critics have said about a previous novel by Philip Roth, the publication of a new one is always accompanied by a stir of anticipation...

...What is it that mesmerizes him so much that the prose rises to the occasion as easily and moisdy as Duncan Hines cake...

...If they're fresh and the nice big ones, I'll have the ocean scallops, please...

...The best of them include the no-nonsense sister of Tarnapol who berates him for the narrow sources of his art in My Life As A Man, and the peaceable little mother first introduced in The Professor of Desire, cooking up and freezing a dozen dinners for her family before setting off to the hospital for a final illness...

...Soon his will be one of the few records of those close-knit, choleric, interfering, warm-blooded families, seen, to be sure, through his baleful stare, yet knockouts of authenticity nevertheless...

...My coarse, vindictive fantasies, your honorable, idealistic human concerns...

...and the reader must draw comfort from this slim hint of confidence in human resilience...

...Several amorous women, ministering to Zuckerman as he suffers from an enormous pain in the neck (plus a delicate one in the soul, a vague one in his conscience and a chronic one in his vanity), try to wean him from his obsession with Appel...

...Zuckerman pretends to be a pornographer named (what else...

...The reader and teacher of Kafka and Henry James...

...He has taught for many years in universities, met and published East European writers, lived for part of recent years in England, and known many intellectuals who do not deprecate his work...

...Just how far from the center of his own experience Roth wants to lure his readers can be gleaned from an unpalatable episode covering a generous portion of The Anatomy Lesson...

...We expect jokes, insults, confessions, emotional embroilment-what Lonoff, young Zuckerman's literary master in The Ghost Writer, calls "turbulence...

...Although he has had his share of praise, he longs for the good opinion of the most demanding critics...

...For Roth's part, he means to divest us of one more illusion: that writers do not read or cannot be wounded by their critics...

...His most blase readers, accustomed to a Roth speciality-sex with the gamey flavor of slightly deteriorating venison-will draw back in wonder...

...Milton Appel, who edits a magazine called Lickety Split...

...They loathe them, and don't particularly care for the smell of the Jewish proletariat either...

...and perhaps the most disarming trait of all, as well as one that may become his undoing, his full knowledge of his own limitations...

...It is true that Roth habitually falls prey to those spurts of cosmic aggressiveness that seem endemic to all comedians (watching Joan Rivers or the more benign Buddy Hackett build momentum for a punch line is a lot like watching a missile being prepared for launching), but he can boast a formid-ablerosterof vivid, oftenlikable Jewish characters, recognizable in their cadences and dispositions...

...Last in the Zuckerman trilogy of wrathful reaction to his audience, The Anatomy Lesson is Roth's highest-pitched (and, to be hoped, ultimate) outcry against la trahison des clercs?the treachery wreaked upon him by religious and intellectual confreres in their misguided effort to sustain a virtuous image of Jewry...

...Even your honesty is a way of debasing things," says the girl taxi driver calmly to the pretend Whitman of sex, her crisp imperturbability one of the very few touches of levity in this grim novel where comedy and Roth have declared a trial separation...

...Why has he put that usable material aside...

...He might start by acknowledging that the vein he has been mining in himself is a very small one, close to the surface-the vein of publicity and reputation-far from the arteries that sustain life...

...Not only is Roth's fiction steeped in Jewish life, but the generation of his parents is disappearing...

...Drug-crazed, Zuckerman takes Bobby's elderly, sweet-tempered father to the cemetery to visit his wife's grave and falls into a murderous fury...

...You pervert my intentions, then call me perverse...

...The work draws on you and draws on you," he tells his old friend Bobby, "and you begin to wonder how much of you there is to draw on...

...The unsettling question that the author doesn't even take a stab at is: What should Philip Roth do now...

...One of the women in Zucker-man's life is a Polish refugee...

...We certainly can't forecast that Roth will ever say never again to his current favorite subject: the misreading by critics and Jewish community spokesmen of Zuckerman's best-selling Carnovsky (a look-alike Portnoy's Complaint...

...He doesn't dwell on nature, doesn't mess with politics, and doesn't purport to be a novelist of ideas...

...Though people are weeping in every corner of the earth from torture and ruin and cruelty and loss, that didn't mean that he could make their stories his...

...For pages he hurls into the innocent ears of the polite young taxi driver with a blonde braid down her back the most jarring language he can muster to describe the humiliating and grotesque options of the sex industry...

...The Hustler routine is neither art nor life, yet it can claim a scary consistency with the rest of The Anatomy Lesson where, as in Rembrandt's painting, we see the body in all its unesthetic vulnerability and decrepitude...

...Even on the subject of the writer's difficulties and disciplines, about which he is an expert, he is content to lament his unhappy lot...

...Still, it must be said that though Roth's characters don't lack life or energy, he never creates a hero or heroine whose fortunes we really want to follow...

...And who would envision -After his deft venture (in that novel and in Zuckerman Unbound) into the disturbing contradictions of family feelings, the intricate system of valves opening and closing to affection-the hostile purgative gush he gives way to this time out...

...Who could have predicted????After the congestion and disarray in The Professor of Desire-the harmonious prose, exquisite pace and (a Roth rarity) lyrical scenes of country landscape in The Ghost Writer...

...One can almost understand why Roth feels like a tormented character out of Kafka...

...To Roth's credit, he allows the battered flesh and sick mind of Zuckerman to recover...

...Despite his very genuine proclivity for seeing his own drawbacks, might there not be present a small disingenuous internal broker reminding him that his audience may relish the spectacle of a best-selling author who cannot enjoy his just rewards, who is having less fun with his millions and his galaxy of women than they with their modest resources...

...Strangely enough, some of his most natural, moving prose is in the beginning of The Ghost Writer, where Zuckerman is a young apprentice, coming for guidance to a novelist for whom he has full admiration...

...The rest of the plot is a vertigo-inducing kaleidoscope of pain, with all its paraphernalia-icepacks, orthopedic collars, scalding showers, hundreds of pills, and their aftermath of toxic anger and violence...

...But he persists, over nearly a hundred pages, in tape-recording ripostes, rehearsing righteous phone calls and fantasizing physical disaster for the critic-All doomed to ineffectuality, since the latter maintains both his opinion and his equanimity...

...Though the notorious Roth voice is often manic and crude, we assume that coming from a writer who is intellectual and self-critical to the hilt, there must be some highfalutin purpose behind the roughhouse tactics, for him to know and us to divine...

...How much easier it is to understand art and sympathize with the predicament of the young artist -because it is a sincere one-in Henry James' story, "The Lesson of the Master...

...Even when the new book is, like The Anatomy Lesson, one of his most exasperating productions, we have to shy off from a simple or final judgment...

...the confident economical strokes used to conjure up (in The Ghost Writer) the figure of a novelist close in accomplishment and manner to Bernard Malamud...

...You seriously entertain the opposition point of view...

...How much more concrete and intriguing are Bernard Malamud's Fidel-man stories about the conditions under which art flourishes...

...To those who recall Roth showing an interviewer his Irving Howe file and saying wistfully "He was a real reader," the episode may exhale the spicy aroma of controversy (and cattiness) between members of the intelligentsia...

...Are we back to his trial by criticism with Roth screaming to the literary judge and jury: "You call me a pornographer...

...Out-hustling Hustler, he has eerily lifted and delivered to us whole the half-baked, self-vindicating, self-deceiving rationale and feculent vocabulary of a man like Larry Flynt...

...Behind this invented problem, invented for Roth as well as for Zuckerman, lies the oppressive real one: Writers like Roth, gifted, clever, observant, blessed with high-fidelity hearing for every kind of speech-but without the natural novelist's entry pass into other lives than their own, or the fascination with character that generates the world's great fiction-Are bound, sooner or later, to run out of subject matter...

...So it is hard to begrudge him even this vengeful outburst: "The comedy is that the real visceral haters of the bourgeois Jews, with the real contempt for their everyday lives, are these complex intellectual giants...

...You lay hold of my comedy with your ten-ton gravity and turn it into a travesty...

...Yet Howe, who was awesomely complete in discerning Roth's faults, scarcely gave him credit for his considerable talents: the buoyant comedy of Portnoy, far more resourceful than "an assemblage of gags...

...But he couldn't get anywhere...

...In search of contact with reality, he plunges into a tangle of wet sheets and towels, roams the hospital corridors, and goes out at night with the interns "as though he still believed he could unchain himself from a future as a man apart and escape the corpus that was his...

...I happen to think you're going to be Zuckerman the doctor just the way you're Zuckerman the writer, no different...

...Feelings and their drama constitute the boundaries of his fiction, and he has no choice except to turn to his own experience...

...Zuckerman shouts over the phone to Milton Appel, the critic whose harsh words in a reconsideration of his work published in a Jewish cultural monthly (not unlike a 1973 article by Irving Howe in Commentary) have cut him to the quick...

...Who, me...