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Philip Roth begins his autobiography, THE FACTS, with a letter to Nathan Zuckerman
asking for Zuckerman's take on the work. However, there's a catch. Zuckerman is
the alter-ego and main character in many of Roth's works of fiction, a very Roth-like
writer whose fictional career is a near mirror-image of Roth's own literary life. Roth
writes:
"Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of
the facts. There is something naive about a novelist like myself talking about presenting
himself 'undisguised' and depicting 'a life without the fiction.' I also invite
oversimplification of a kind I don't at all like by announcing that searching out the
facts may have been a kind of therapy for me. You search your past with certain questions
on your mind --- indeed, you search out your past to discover which events have led you to
asking those specific questions. It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of
the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the
facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning."
Roth's "sequence of stories" begins with his remembrances of growing up Jewish
in Newark, New Jersey. Watching his father confront the local enemy --- prejudice --- in
the workplace was tempered by, on the one hand, a general fear of the events unfolding on
the international front with Germany and Japan and, on the other hand, a love of baseball.
We follow Roth through his college years, his early success as a writer, his first
marriage, and in the wake of that, the turmoil that the publication of PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT
brought to this young novelist's life.
The book ends with an open reply by Nathan Zuckerman to Roth.
"I've read the manuscript twice. Here is the candor you ask for: Don't publish ---
you are far better off writing about me than 'accurately' reporting your own life...on the
evidence of what I've just read, I'd say you're still as much in need of me as I of you
--- and that I need you is indisputable... I am your permission, your indiscretion, the
key to disclosure... In the fiction you can be so much more truthful without worrying all
the time about causing direct pain."
In THE FACTS, Philip Roth explores the boundaries between his life and his craft, where
they intersect and where they diverge. His clever use of Zuckerman as critic and devil's
advocate proves a unique slant on autobiography, and the sleight of hand needed to carry
if off only enhance an admiration for his ability, wit and candor.
--- Reviewed by Vern Wiessner
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