The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

By offering his memoirs plus a critique of same penned by his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, Roth here undermines the autobiographical genre as he derailed fictional conventions in The Counterlife. Roth lays bare his private lifeor obscures the really juicy parts because, as Zuckerman says, autobiography may indeed be "the most manipulative of all literary forms." He also manages to beat those nasty book reviewers to the punch, because Zuckerman is the first to recognize that "this isn't you at your most interesting." Bathed here in a quasi-nostalgic glow, the writer's youth and college years are pretty tame; Roth is smart, loquacious but quite the good Jewish boy. The book becomes much more energetic and absorbing when Roth describes his self-destructive relationship with "Josie," a woman who bought a urine specimen from a pregnant black stranger in a park in order to bully Roth into marrying her (which he does after insisting on an abortion), and whom Roth calls "the greatest creative-writing teacher of them all, specialist par excellence in the aesthetics of extremist fiction." Another unlikely font for his imagination was the Jewish community; the uproar over Goodbye, Columbus helped to fuel Portnoy's Complaint and the Zuckerman series. Despite their weaknesses, these reflections would stand even on their own as perspicacious insights by a past master of fiction on a writer's beginnings, quest for freedom and creative muses. With the Zuckerman add-on, the book becomes a unique demonstration of the superiority of fiction over autobiography as an uninhibited, introspective, self-confrontive form. Portions of the book previously appeared in the Atlantic , New York Times Book Review and Vanity Fair. BOMC and QPBC selections.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

There is no doubt that Roth has secured a place for himself in American literary history, and this book will do nothing to jeopardize that place. Roth provides an anecdotal journey through five stages of his life: his New Jersey youth; his college days at Bucknell; meeting his wife-to-be while an instructor at the University of Chicago; his early writing days, including the uproar he caused in the Jewish community; and his life in the Sixties. Roth may have written "the facts," but they are not the complete facts. The work is episodic, sketchy, and sometimes self-indulgent (as such books as this can be), but an offering from one like Roth belongs in libraries. John Budd, Graduate Lib. Sch., Univ. of Arizona, Tucson
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.