John Dugdale
Zuckerman on a Zimmerframe
Artists’ late phases normally involve obsessive repetition, and modest variations on the same theme and form – Monet’s water lilies, Bellow’s curmudgeons. But not in Philip Roth’s case: his strikingly varied output since 2000 has consisted of an unsettling May-to-December love story (The Dying Animal); a counterfactual historical novel (The Plot Against America); a parable-like account of one man’s life from childhood to death (Everyman); and now the completion of a cycle he began twenty-eight years ago.
His final Nathan Zuckerman novel concludes a saga that is both longer than the other great American postwar sequences, John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom quartet and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe trilogy, and set apart from them in that it falls into two distinct groups.
The works that appeared between 1979 and 1986 – a trilogy plus a novella (The Prague Orgy) and The Counterlife – show Zuckerman in transition from youth to middle age, and from the aspiring author of The Ghost Writer to the famous one of Zuckerman Unbound. Much of the CV
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'What Bower brings sharply into focus here is how lonely Johnson is, how dependent on excitement and applause to stave off recurring depression.'
From the archive: Michael White analyses the life and leadership of Boris Johnson.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/crisis-what-crisis-3
'Sometimes, dragons’ greed can have comic consequences, including indigestion. We read the 1685 tale of the dragon of Wantley, whose weakness is, comically, his arse. The hero delivers a lethal kick to the dragon’s behind, and the dragon dies.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/terrors-of-the-sky
'We must all "shoot down the canard", McManus writes, that the World Cup is going to a nation "that doesn’t know or appreciate the Beautiful Game".'
Barnaby Crowcroft on the rise of Qatar.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/full-of-gas