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Thursday October 4, 2007

Roth bids adieu to Nathan Zuckerman

by hillel italie
ap

Philip Roth says he’s done with Nathan Zuckerman.

But is Nathan done with Philip Roth?

Nearly 25 years and several more Zuckerman books later, Roth says he’s really finished with his most enduring protagonist. “Exit Ghost,” in which Zuckerman confronts old age and the decline of his powers, is, the author insists, the final word on the imaginary novelist with the Roth-like career.

“I think so,” Roth says when asked if Nathan is gone.

Think so?

“I know so,” he responds, with a laugh. “I mean this to be conclusive, because that was my intention, and, as far as I know, my intentions are honorable.”

From the beginning, like a rebellious child, Nathan has never turned out as planned. Roth first thought of Zuckerman back in the 1970s, when he frequently visited Eastern Europe and became a champion of such Communist bloc dissidents as Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima.

Like Roth, Nathan is a New Jersey native famous for a scandalous novel (“Portnoy’s Complaint” for Roth, “Carnovsky” for Nathan). Both are Jewish liberals born in the 1930s (Nathan is 71, Roth 74). Their affinity is so strong that when Roth wrote a memoir, “The Facts,” Nathan was given the final word, urging his creator not to publish the book.

“You are far better off writing about me than `accurately’ reporting your own life,” Nathan advises.

The appeal of Nathan, Roth explains, is that “certain characters give you room to do certain things.”

In “Exit Ghost,” Roth allows Nathan to write his own escape, or at least lets readers believe that it’s Nathan wanting out. Nathan has met a young woman he becomes infatuated with. Unable to seduce her in the novel’s “real life,” he instead tries to write a fictional conquest, fails again and runs.

“Thus, with only a moment’s more insanity on his part — a moment of insane excitement — he throws everything into his bag ... and gets out as fast as he can,” Roth-Nathan writes.

Nathan has left, “for good.” And Roth is well into another novel — without him.

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