SANFORD PINSKER
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characters tend to end their sentences in exclamation points. When exas–
perated, they shout; when angered, they yell.
By contrast, order and patience are Lonoff's watchwords. He stands
above or beneath or beyond whatever frays he chronicles. Zuckerman,
on the other hand, has a nasty habit of seeking out the dead center of
cultural storms and then hurling himself into their teeth. This, Lonoff
recognizes with equal measures of envy and irony, is what makes Zuck–
erman...well, Zuckerman. It largely accounts for the voice he so
admires, and that the solicitous young writer must learn to cultivate.
Don't worry so much "about wrong," he tells him, without knowing the
full story behind "Higher Education," the most ambitious Zuckerman
fiction so far and the one that has so infuriated his father.
Lonoff, being Lonoff, suspects that his young, would-be protege has
taken in an earful during his overnight stay, and that he will, one day,
write the fireworks up. That, of course, is precisely what real writers do
and what Zuckerman indeed does twenty years later when he gives us
The Ghost Writer.
Beca use Lonoff is a fellow a rtist, he knows, as Zuckerman's outraged
censors never will, that shaping events into plausible truths is what gen–
uine writers do. Indeed, among his last words to Zuckerman are these:
"I'll be curious to see how we all come out someday.
It
could be an
interesting story. You're not so nice and polite in your fiction." Indeed.
With a pen in his hand, Zuckerman can be a dangerous person, one who
holds cliches up for inspection and probes toward truths that give the
term subversive whole new meanings. Roth is often seen as a writer who
has turned transgression into a cottage industry. His characters seem–
ingly never meet a prohibition that they like, much less willingly obey.
But I would argue that excess is a more accurate description of the voice
we keep hearing in our heads. His characters, whether one is thinking
of Alexander Portnoy in
Portnoy's Complaint
(1969),
Nathan Zucker–
man in
My Life as a Man
(1974),
Mickey Sabbath in
Sabbath's Theater
(1995),
or David Kepesh in
The Dying Animal
(2001),
are out to exor–
cise demons or to make space for personal liberation. The demons I'm
referring to usually come with the territory of a marriage gone dread–
fully sour. In the case of Peter Tamopol, the blocked writer of
My Life
as a Man,
telling the "true story" of how he was duped into marrying a
monster of the first water requires that he create a fictional counter–
part-none other than the Nathan Zuckerman who figures promi–
nently in no less than nine subsequent Roth novels. Zuckerman allows
Roth (or is it Tamopol, the man who has not yet returned to Roth's fic–
tion?) the necessary imaginative freedom to run wild. Excess, in short,
