582 The American Century: Literature since 1945to reflect selfhood and nationhood. Much of the finest of this later fiction considers
the fate of a writer, Nathan Zuckerman, very much like Roth, so that the book
itself becomes a mirror – or, perhaps more accurately, becomes a means of gazing
through the library window at other books. The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman
Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and The Prague Orgy (1985) were later
collected as Zuckerman Bound and then followed by five more Zuckerman novels,
The Counterlife (1986), American Pastoral (1997), I Married A Communist (1998),
The Human Stain (2000), and Exit Ghost (2007). Some of Roth’s other novels
concern another surrogate for the author, a professor called David Kepesh: The Breast
(1972), The Professor of Desire (1977), and The Dying Animal (2001). Still others
focus on a writer called Philip (Deception (1990)) or Philip Roth (Operation Shylock:
A Confession (1993)) or, as in Everyman (2006), a character who replicates moments
in the author’s life. All of these books, however self-referential they may be at the
point of origin, are concerned not just with personal identity but with the identity
of America, just as Roth’s more openly social and political fictions, like Our Gang
(1971) and The Great American Novel (1973), are. His work may be profoundly
autobiographical, but it is also deeply implicated in history – and the history of
America in particular. It may be absorbed in the perennial human subjects of eros
and death, the desiring and decaying human body, but it is no less obsessed with the
dreams and disappointments of ordinary Americans, as they are confronted by
social change and historical conflict, the challenges of racial division and economic
oppression, what Roth clearly sees as the high point of American idealism and social
cohesion in the 1940s and the subsequent disintegration of the American dream.
“The book of my life is a book of voices,” the narrator of I Married A Communist
declares. True of every Roth novel, what those voices disclose is that the personal is
the political. That disclosure is clear in a book like The Plot Against America (2004),
which imagines an extreme right-wing, anti-Semitic coup in the United States that
threatens both the entire nation and a very particular family. It is even clearer in
American Pastoral, where Zuckerman, in trying to tell the story of a man he sees as
an archetypal American hero – occupying what Portnoy would have called the
“center-field” – finds himself telling the story of his nation. “I dreamed a realistic
chronicle,” Zuckerman explains. But, as that paradoxical remark intimates, what he
ends up with is fiction, myth: the pastoral story Americans have invented for
themselves of their aboriginal innocence – their longing for freedom, a pure
subjective space, and their feelings of dereliction and dismay when they do not have
it. In an earlier novel, The Counterlife, Zuckerman had described the womb as
“the pastoral landscape par excellence”; and that suggests the take on American
versions of pastoralism here. American Pastoral is a meditation on the yearning, the
looking backward that maybe determines any attempt to understand and narrate
ourselves. It is also, and more specifically, about the special American inflection
given to this, which claims the United States as what Zuckerman calls “desire’s
homeland,” a state of primal, prelapsarian grace.
Grace, or the possibility of it, is one of the concerns of John Updike (1932–2009),
whose 1963 novel The Centaur has an epigraph from Karl Barth. “Heaven is theGGray_c05.indd 582ray_c 05 .indd 582 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM