Status Updates From Zukerman encadenado

The Prague Orgy begins! And it’s a wickedly funny novella.

My deep-dive into Philip Roth and his altar ego Nathan Zuckerman continues. Three novels done and one to go. Thoroughly enjoying his crackling sentences.

“But once one’s writing, it’s all limits. Bound to a subject. Bound to make sense of it. Bound to make a book of it. If you want to be reminded of your limitations virtually every minute, there’s no better occupation to choose. Your memory, your diction, your intelligence, your sympathies, your observations, your sensations, your understanding — never enough.”

“But what became colossal was the next page. He thought he had chosen life but what he had chosen was the next page. Stealing time to write stories, he never thought to wonder what time might be stealing from him. Only gradually did the perfecting of a writer’s iron will begin to feel like the evasion of experience, and the means to imaginative release… like the sternest form of incarceration.

“… And then he puts it in and I know just what to do to make him come. And then he mumbles something about tits and love and he comes. Then I put on the light and roll on my side and light up a cigarette and get on with my book. I’m reading the one you told me about. Jean Rhys.”

"I will not make atonement on the Op Ed page for the books he's accused me of writing! I cracked a few jokes about playing stinky-pinky in Newark and you'd think I'd blown up the Knesset. Don't start confusing me with your Wasp clarity- 'there is no problem.' There is! This is not my maiden appearance in the pages of Foreskin as their Self-Hating jew of the Month."

Hilarious!

Now, The Anatomy Lesson. Zuckerman is in agony. Like Prometheus, but mainly in the neck.