Word: zuckerman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...writer's self-sacrificial nature, insistent Jewish guilt, and sexual desire all torment Roth's hero, a young short story writer named Nathan Zuckerman. Nathan's dilemma concerns the purpose of his art: is his ultimate responsibility to himself or his Jewish heritage? Even the writer of the Bible must have paused to consider the personal and social consequences of his creation. In the end, Nathan, like Roth, chooses to write for himself and let the kleenex fall where they may. "There is obviously no simple way to be great," says Nathan...
...fantasy. He retreats, in fact, to the drab reality of the 1950s, the time of his own spectacular debut as the author of Goodbye, Columbus. The new book retains the look, if not the actual furniture, of autobiography. Goodbye, Columbus is called Higher Education; its author is Nathan Zuckerman who, like Roth, was raised in a middle-class Jewish section of Newark. His story is based on a family embarrassment, a tale of money, lawsuits and maternal sacrifice that upsets his parents and the pillars of their community. "Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story...
What the tribe finds offensive, the literary priesthood hails as original. Zuckerman is granted an audience at the Berkshire retreat of E.I. Lonoff, a celebrated carpenter of ironic Jewish stories. To the young writer, art replaces traditions, Lonoff supersedes all spiritual advisers as the chief rabbi of aesthetic purity, and the visit itself becomes a kind of bar mitzvah at which Zuckerman is accepted as a man and a writer...
...real Amy curtly evades Nathan's questions about her background. She is a smart and very tough cookie. As is Lonoff; as is Zuckerman; as is Roth himself. The Ghost Writer is a bruising book. Within its artfully tangled plot, Roth tells off his critics and debunks romantic notions of the writing life. Henry James' "passion of doubt" and "madness of art" become a medieval incubus and fanatic patience; Lonoff, more the ascetic Old World Jew than his Yankee trappings might indicate, spends all his time pushing sentences around and worrying about them. His comment on writing...
Roth gets it just right: the cadences and diction of the provincial and the pretentious, the fresh edge of Nathan's ambition, his helpless rage and the confusion of his victims. Zuckerman will do anything for a good line. He imagines going home with news for his mother. "I met a marvelous young woman while I was up in New England. I love her and she loves me. We are going to be married." "Married? But so fast? Nathan, is she Jewish?" "Yes, she is." "But who is she?" "Anne Frank...