Book Reviews
Zuckerman Bound: In bringing together in one volume his last three novels ...Philip Roth has presumably completed the saga of his fictional hero, Nathan Zuckerman. It is the story of how an earnest young student of literature grows up, writes a scandalous best seller and experiences the debilitating effects of fame. And it is also a story about the unforeseen consequences of art, the strange, predatory relationship that exists between literature and life, and an American writer's anomalous sense of vocation.
It's hard to say whether the parts of this volume add up to something more than their sum. In the first place, reading the Zuckerman fictions together, one is more acutely aware of fluctuations in Mr. Roth's style—the limber, Jamesian prose and delicate ironies of The Ghost Writer stand in marked contrast to the more staccato rhythms of Zuckerman Unbound and the frenzied, almost incoherent mannerisms of The Anatomy Lesson. The self-reflexive nature of the three novels also feels more pronounced when they are read all at once.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
The Ghost Writer: Philip Roth has given us a beautifully intricate novel that fulfills the promise of [his] early stories.... Now, it might conceivably be argued that as Mr. Roth grows older he is simply recycling the obsessions of his youth—his rebellion against the role of nice Jewish boy he played in his childhood and adolescence (or that his fictional persona played, at any rate); his guilt over exercising his freedom as an artist; and his insistence on the right to imagine in his work the bad people as well as the good who happen to be Jewish. But never before, that I can recall, has he handled these materials so deftly.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times
Zuckerman Unbound: It's really too bad. Zuckerman is unbound, all right, but in the sense of being cut loose from everything that made him what he was. Zuckerman Unbound is masterful, sure in every touch, clear and economical of line as a crystal vase, but there is something diminished about it, as about its immediate predecessors. The usual heartbreak and hilarity are there, but they no longer amplify each other; now both are muted.... And I do wish Mr. Roth would stop apologizing for Portnoy's Complaint. Its bite sinks deepest into the soft spot of something more American than it is Jewish.
George Stade - New York Times Book Review
The Prague Orgy puts [Roth's] self-conscious concerns in perspective and also casts them in a ludicrously comic light. Where the celebrated American writer receives money and fame for writing a sensational novel, the East European writer receives a jail sentence. Where the American writer gets thrown to the critics, the East European writer gets arrested by the police. And where the American writer suffers paranoia over importunate fans, the East European writer suffers real anxiety over informers and bugged rooms. The irony of all this, Mr. Roth implies, is that the freedom enjoyed by writers in the West also reduces them to celebrities—their work is not taken with the moral seriousness conferred upon the work of their comrades in Eastern Europe.... Mr. Roth...demonstrates, in this story, that he is a writer of far greater subtlety and inventiveness than his fictional hero. The Prague Orgy is free of the shrillness and self-pity that mar earlier sections of this volume, and it also possesses a new range and density of ambition. Roth fans can only hope that instead of merely marking the end of the Zuckerman saga, it marks another beginning.
Michikio Kakutani - New York Times