The Birth of Nathan Zuckerman - The Ghost Writer

Part of the fun reading Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer some 30+ years after its publication is to see how the novel was in some ways predictive of Roth's career as a writer. Also, part of the fun is figuring out on whom he based the main characters. The novel, published in I think 1979 when Roth had achieved both fame and notoriety (two words far too often mistaken for synonyms) with Portnoy's Complaint and several satiric follow-ups, is written as a writer of Roth's age looking back some 20 years to his apprenticeship. This novel introduced - I think - Nathan Zuckerman, who was to become Roth's literary alter ego in a number of novels to follow throughout Roth's long career; here, Zuckerman reflects on a time in about 1960 when he'd published a few stories, was at a writer's colony (Yadoo, seemingly), paid of visit of homage to an older writer who is one of his literary lions. The older writer is a largely unknown Jewish-Yiddish fabulist who's gotten some recognition late in life and lives in a small house in the country with his old-line Yankee wife, completely in isolation from literary scene that he eschews. The young Z. says: I would like to live that life. And we have to smile, knowing that Roth felt the same, and did the same, but always kept a shrewd eye on the publications and a hand in the battle. But the isolated life is the ideal image for every young writer I think - sitting in a small home, typing away every day, no distractions, no pressures. Ha! The writer Z. visits is E.I. (?) Lonoff - most closely modeled, obviously, on I.B. Singer, but Singer never married a shiksa and retired to the Berkshires - so there are elements as well of two other contemporary Jewish-American writers, Salinger and Bellow, the latter certainly one of Roth's heroes. In the first 40 pages or so, the young Z. sees some powerful tension between Yonoff and spouse, realizing the pastoral future he'd envisioned for himself is far from paradisal. He also is fascinated with a young scholar who is on hand to study some of Yanoff's manuscripts - and his drive for her will be the engine that drives the plot of this novel. Roth builds some great scenes, terrific dialogue of course, and some powerful and revealing contrasts between what Z. tells Y. about his life and his work and what he reveals, as the narrator, about his actual life in NYC, his frustrations and infidelities. These were not - till Roth made them so much later - suitable material for a fabulist such as Yonoff to hear, or so Z. thinks at the time.