David Sexton
Shooting More Than His Mouth Off
Philip Roth notoriously writes books about Philip Roth under another name. For the last five it has been the same name: Nathan Zuckerman. In an interview he defended the practice ingeniously:
Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all.
Yet truly getting pleasure from a ventriloquist depends not just on the voice appearing to come from a distance but also on its then sounding different.
His great subject is his struggle to be himself, not what others want him to be. At first this was fairly straightforwardly a matter of
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