I’m posting this in the hopes that some of you are familiar with the work of novelist Philip Roth and can give me some advice on the Zuckerman novels. Basically I want to know how much sense they will make to someone who reads them out of order. I happen to be something of a fan of Roth, but have avoided these particular novels because I couldn’t really get into The Ghost Writer. However, some of the other Zuckerman novels appeal to me for one reason or another, but I don’t want to start ordering them for fear that I will find myself hopelessly lost due to references to earlier books, authorial assumptions about my familiarity with the main character’s background, etc. So, can anybody help me out?
The only Zuckerman novels I’ve read are American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. I read them in that order. The Counterlife is on my to-read stack. I don’t recall any crossover from book to book, they’re so different and they stand alone. American Pastoral was my first Roth novel and is still my favorite by far. The non-Zuckerman novel I’ve read of his is The Plot Against America.
Roth’s use of narrators (and of Zuckerman in particular) is very inconsistent. As I recall (I think I’ve read all of the Zuckerman books–and the Ghost Writer was GREAT!!!) details about Zuckerman change from book to book --what his father did for a living, how many siblings he had, etc. and I thought this was deliberate on Roth’s part to keep his reader from making assumptions about Zuckerman, perhaps. Pretty stupid strategy, but for some reason it was important to Roth.
I’ve read Human Stain and now currently I’m reading American Pastoral. Agree about the inconsistency in how he uses the Zuckerman narrator. I tend to agree that you probably don’t gain much by necessarily reading the books in order. I’m finding how he builds American Pastoral a little odd in that once you’re into the part of where it focuses solely on Swede Levov, Zuckerman fades completely into the background (I’m about in the middle now, maybe he’ll return). How Zuckerman “writes” the story of Levov isn’t even really dealt with, it seems as if he comes to the story via his own imagination. I don’t remember Zuckerman “disappearing” during The Human Stain for such long stretches.