Zuckerman's dying swansong

(Originally posted on 15th September 2007)

Given my almost lycanthropic relationship with sunshine, last week's release from summer's clammy embrace has been quite blissful. Thursday morning saw me quite joyous as I beheld the mist hanging over the railway cutting and I struck out with crisp strides to the tube station.

Befitting such an autumnal turn, I decided to read Exit Ghost, Philip Roth's forthcoming final chronicle of Nathan Zuckerman. I'd given a quote to The Bookseller, admittedly somewhat mischievously, that it was "the Deathly Hallows of serious literature" and anticipated a masterpiece comparable to Updike or Bellow.

I read it with burgeoning disbelief. It's the worst book I've read all year.

The pivotal relationship of the book is that between Zuckerman and Jamie, the wife of the couple with whom Zuckerman has arranged to swap houses. He remembers her from some lecture he gave when she was a student, although her recollections of the encounter are not noted. He too had the privilege of meeting a literary idol when young, the now forgotten E I Lonoff, whose biography Jamie's sometime lover - and is he still? - is intent on writing.

Zuckerman's attitude to the biographer Kliman is aloof, condescending and obnoxious to the point that his valid concerns about the motives for reintroducing Lonoff to the canon are undermined. Kliman and Zuckerman are diametric: young and old, extroverted and introverted, full of vim and full of bile. Kliman represents how tawdry the relationship between the artist and his audience has become.

Now I'm all for a bit of misanthropy from time to time, especially if it's done with the sort of élan which demarcates its author as occupying the sort of high ground which validates it. Roth, as a great twentieth century writer, has that, but Zuckerman does not. I think Roth has here allowed Zuckerman to become a mouthpiece for his views on the sanctity of literature. I'm sure there are students of Philip Roth who might say that I've completely misjudged where Roth ends and Zuckerman begins. But both Zuckerman and Roth, who are similarly reclusive, evidently feel that the man and the writer are entities to be considered separately and, in that fundamental kinship, Roth, to my mind at least, undermines that very idea.

I'm not going any further down that route. It'll only end in tears and discussion of Wagner. Every reader reads his own book, and I'll gladly leave it at that.

The oddest thing about Exit Ghost, though, is the passages where Zuckerman, each time he has spoken with Jamie, writes these imagined conversations between the two of them in the form of a playscript. I'm not sure if these passages are also meant to indicate some of extrapolated subtext to their conversations. It's more than likely I've missed the point altogether, but to make proper sense of it all, I'd have to read it again, and I'm not sure I've done anything to deserve that.

I must confess at this point that this is only the second Roth I've ever read and the first was a much earlier work I read about fifteen years ago. I really ought to try American Pastoral or The Human Stain or indeed just about anything else he's written, going by his exalted reputation.

I do seem to have a knack for homing in on the dodgy ones when I make a foray into the backlist of big name authors I've hitherto managed to avoid. William Boyd? I read Armadillo. Absolute rubbish. Matthew Kneale? Small Crimes In An Age Of Abundance. One first-class short story and eleven wearisome ones. Margaret Atwood? Oryx and Crake. Bloody tedious and certainly amongst the odder choices by a Booker panel to make the shortlist; it's a weak dystopian short story dragged out to novel length, like one of those dreadful 80s 12-inch extended remixes.

I'm quite sure in all three cases that their reputations do not rely on the books I happened to try and that I'd be as smitten as anyone else by Any Human Heart or English Passengers or The Handmaid's Tale. They're on to the 'to read' pile, the only downside of that being that if it were just the one pile, it'd be a hazard to aircraft, so I can't guarantee a second chance to any of them before the Tories get back into power.

Or, by way of a more recognisable time scale for any Americans who've stumbled across this, before the Rapture.

Incidentally*, I was reading in Have A Nice Doomsday, Nicholas Guyatt's despatches from America's Bible Belt, that there are hundreds of thousands of Christians who are so convinced that Jesus will whisk them up to heaven at a moment's notice that they won't take jobs like piloting aircraft or driving buses because they don't want to condemn their passengers to the rather messy fate that awaits people when the person in charge of their vehicle they're in suddenly vanishes in a puff of sanctimony.

Well, that's the evangelical for you: a couple of disciples short of a Last Supper but considerate with it.

I've been listening to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy by Elton John while writing this. I'll steadfastly defend Elton John up to a point, but that point is 1976. Floreat 1972-76 and there's not been a song worth growing ears for since. But his early stuff is extraordinarily beautiful, even if the remastered versions out now still don't hide the fact that the drumming sounds like a frankfurter on an upturned bucket.

*Oh, all right, I confess: it was just a very contrived link. Still, Eddie Izzard would be proud of me.