Zuckerman Unbound: The Conversation Nathan Can’t End
Nathan Zuckerman has thanked his admirer four times, and dinner has barely begun. The man beside his table praises the humor, compassion, and understanding of Carnovsky, Nathan’s sensationally successful novel. Nathan lifts half a sandwich as a courteous signal that the conversation is over. His admirer names the high school he attended.
Alvin Pepler has found a connection, and each attempt to conclude the meeting supplies him with another reason to continue it. In Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound, the price of becoming a celebrated writer can be measured in the time required to get away from somebody who has enjoyed your book.
Roth keeps us at a conversation Nathan wants to end, and asks us to enjoy the delay. That divided experience gives the novel its comic force and also its limit. Once Pepler has shown us how praise can become a claim on the writer, the next digression has to earn the time it takes. His most extravagant speeches sometimes do.
This essay discusses the novel in full, including its ending.
How Carnovsky makes Nathan available to everyone
The opening bus ride establishes the problem through a small error of address. A passenger announces Nathan’s success to the other riders; a schoolgirl then speaks to him politely as “Mr. Carnovsky.” Courtesy preserves the confusion. She knows how to address an adult, and has no reason to separate the author from the man in his book.
Roth rapidly varies that confusion across the city. A woman thanks Nathan for her sexual liberation, a library reader reproaches him for what he has done to his parents, and a meter reader wants to know whether he really did all those things. Each person possesses a usable Nathan. The compressed succession lets us feel how little the writer can negotiate before the next claim is made on him.
His private attempts to adjust are funny too. The narration slips from an account of his movements into instructions he gives himself: change your appearance, alter your walk, remember that people are watching. Publicity has interrupted the ordinary inattention with which he used to inhabit his body. Even walking now requires a performance.
The quick encounters establish this thoroughly; their brevity belongs to their effect. Pepler changes the scale. He can remain beside Nathan for pages, enduring embarrassment, revising his approach, treating each concession as permission to ask for more. Roth has found a man whose conversation makes escape an action the novelist must keep failing to perform.
A conversation paid for in sandwiches
Pepler was once a television quiz-show winner. He wants his brief celebrity restored, his account of the scandal that ended it believed, and his writing read by somebody who can get it published. These wants arrive inside his admiration for Carnovsky. Nathan cannot accept a compliment without appearing to accept an obligation.
The physical comedy saves this from becoming an abstract dispute about what readers owe writers. Pepler asks for Nathan’s pickle, then finds a use for the remaining sandwich. Nathan supplies a handkerchief when Pepler needs to wipe his mouth. With each small concession, the two men acquire a little more of the intimacy Pepler has been claiming. Nathan wants to be left alone, but he also wants to remain a decent man; leaving another man hungry, or refusing him something so negligible, would feel absurdly grand.
He helps Pepler along verbally, too. Pretending to remember a producer’s father from a meeting in Ireland, Nathan says, “Vaguely.” The small assent is meant to pacify Pepler. It becomes the basis for a supposed assurance that Pepler can trust the producer. Nathan must now deny having said what his admirer has made him say, and denial requires still more conversation.
There is a generous joke here about the inadequacy of ordinary manners. Thanking, agreeing, feeding somebody: all the things that should ease an encounter prolong it. Pepler can be considerate as well as demanding. When he buys Nathan an ice cream, his solicitous question about the topping briefly gives him the air of a father treating a boy. The relationship keeps offering Nathan a reason to hesitate before walking away.
Roth gives the delay a wonderfully miserable measurement: fifteen minutes have taken the men one block. We have traveled much farther through Pepler’s past, but Nathan has scarcely moved. The speech is an obstacle with a human history. That distinction matters, since a mere bore would give us little reason to stay either.
Pepler takes over the review
On their next encounter, Pepler’s memory for popular songs wins Nathan over. Nathan whistles a tune his father used to whistle during the war. Pepler identifies it after three notes, then supplies a whole year’s worth of hits. A memory intimate to Nathan turns out to belong to the enormous repertory in this other man’s head. For a while, neither man’s celebrity is the most interesting thing about him.
Nathan’s admiration begins to feed the performance. His “you’re amazing” prompts a list of song titles beginning with “You’re”; even a request to quiet down near a funeral supplies more words for Pepler to match to songs. The sentences can scarcely find an exit from his memory. But Nathan is now laughing and asking for more. We can feel the difference between an author detained by an admirer and a listener enjoying a performer. Pepler has earned the space he occupies.
The review he has written of Carnovsky changes their positions again. Pepler wants to be accepted as an intellectual equal, and Nathan is asked to judge the very piece that makes this claim. His opening encouragement does not satisfy Pepler. More specific criticism goes worse. Nathan finds the writing wordy and the thoughts unremarkable, then questions a line that Pepler particularly likes.
Pepler compresses Nathan’s criticism into a three-part verdict: “One, the writing stinks. Two, the thoughts stink. Three, my best line stinks worst of all.” Nathan has said none of this so baldly. The numbering strips away Nathan’s qualifications, then delivers the verdict with the brisk certainty Pepler brought to song titles. A performance that made him entertaining now makes him impossible to answer. How can Nathan correct the record when every correction may supply another exhibit?
Soon Pepler is imitating Nathan’s verbal mannerisms. The famous writer no longer even controls the sound of his own replies. Then comes the accusation that Nathan stole Pepler’s experiences for Carnovsky. Praise has become a demand for credit: the man who wanted access to the author now claims to have supplied the book.
Pepler’s talk has altered who can judge whom, and the hurt behind his outburst is intelligible even when his accusation is not credible. He has brought something of his own to a successful writer and heard it found wanting. Nathan cannot repair that injury by explaining that his criticism was milder than Pepler makes it sound.
The word Henry hears
Pepler can give Nathan pleasure, show tenderness, reveal a formidable gift. Too often for me, these openings lead back to a grievance about what he has been denied. His verbal resources seem greater than the range of relations the novel allows him. I am often ready for Nathan to get away before I am ready to lose Pepler, and wish their encounters more often produced something besides another difficulty in escaping him.
Nathan also begins turning Pepler into literary material almost as soon as he meets him. The notebook’s “My pickle his madeleine” is funny: a piece of Nathan’s dinner has already acquired a distinguished literary ancestry. Yet Nathan’s eagerness to interpret Pepler can make their resemblance feel too insistently explained. Nathan’s notes identify Pepler as a possible version of himself, rather than leaving their changing exchanges to do all that work. Roth catches the novelist at his transforming business, but also supplies conclusions that the comedy has made available to us already.
For me, Zuckerman Unbound remains slighter than Roth’s best later novels. Its ambition is clear, and the writing can be wonderfully alive without the whole feeling equally developed. The strongest reason to qualify that judgment comes when the talkative stranger gives way to Nathan’s own family.
At his dying father’s bedside, Nathan cannot be certain what the last word means, or finally even what word he has heard. The narration first gives us “Bastard.” Nathan considers other sounds and wishes. His brother Henry thinks their father said “Batter,” remembering their grandmother’s baking. An accusation can be heard where another son hears a domestic memory.
Henry’s later insistence that the word was indeed “Bastard” follows Nathan’s effort to persuade him to break out of his obedient life. Henry has spoken of the acting ambitions he gave up; Nathan urges him toward the freedom he himself has taken. The encouragement does not bring them closer. Henry accuses Nathan of killing their father with Carnovsky. That is a brother’s charge, not a cause of death the novel establishes.
Here Roth does not merely add a more painful person to the line of people claiming Nathan’s book. The brothers’ quarrel changes the evidence through which we understand the father. Henry’s first hearing remains on the page beside his later certainty; we cannot recover the dying man’s intention by choosing the brother we like better.
At first, Henry hears cake mixture; after talking with Nathan, he hears condemnation. We are left to judge the living brother’s change of mind while the dead father’s word remains beyond correction.
Sources
Philip Roth, Zuckerman Unbound (1981). E-book, ISBN 9781466846456.
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