Word: unbounding
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ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND by Philip Roth Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 225 pages...
...what a clever idea for a novel. In Zuckerman Unbound, a sequel to The Ghost Writer, Newark-born Nathan Zuckerman has made a million dollars with Carnovsky, an ethnic and sexual extravaganza that resembles Portnoy's Complaint. Zuckerman's problem is not sex but a reluctance to indulge in the conventional rewards of his money and fame. Says André Schevitz, his agent: "First you lock yourself away in order to stir up your imagination, now you lock yourself away because you've stirred up theirs...
...looks at his son and whispers, "Bastard." Is this the final misunderstanding, the last, most painful blurring of illusion and illusionist? The question is mooted by Zuckerman's response. He is relieved. With his father dead and his old Newark neighborhood unrecognizable, the author of Carnovsky is literally unbound...
Like the end of Portnoy's Complaint, the conclusion of Zuckerman Unbound suggests a new beginning. Nathan even shows his impatience when he says, "Being a poor misunderstood millionaire is not really a topic that intelligent people can discuss for very long." As a sturdy vehicle for Roth's comic genius, Zuckerman may show up again: Will he travel to Prague and discover Franz Kafka as an aged steam-bath attendant? Will he beget children who grow up to be literary critics? Will he win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and have to return it when everything...
Sometimes Kucinich can sound like a stereotyped left-intellectual: in his Playboy interview he drops allusions to 1984, Ghandi, Prometheus Unbound, Salvador Dali and Woody Allen. But Kucinich grew up in a large Catholic family in the inner city. His father is a truck driver who quit school after the ninth grade. As mayor, Kucinich forced business leaders to meet with him at Tony's Diner. He hopes to unite blacks and white ethnics under his banner of "urban populism." It is this vision of "the coalition of the future" that makes Kucinich unique...