Zuckerman Bound by Philip Roth (06/09)

Three novels and a novella collected in a single volume documenting minutia in the life of Nathan Zuckerman, infamous Jewish-American novelist, the most narcissistic project I have ever read, but not bad for all that. Roth is upfront about only being inspired to write about slight variations on his own experience. He is a writer, exclusively, of the internal. The outside world only matters as far as it impacts his inner life. The best of the four was Zuckerman Unbound - the best written, the funniest, the most acerbic. The Anatomy Lesson goes on and on about Zuckerman's undiagnosed chronic pain, which he relieves with vodka, pot, painkillers, and passive fucking. The pain would be a cheap metaphor worthy of English Lit 101 if Zuckerman, being the writer he is, didn't constantly mull over its symbolic significances - the pain is his guilt for exposing his family in best-selling novels, it's the wound of an estranged brother or the presence of his mother's ghost, etc. The Ghost Writer was irritating, and Roth's trademark bon mots (so dry as to be dessicated) felt strained.