The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 25, 1988 by George Garrett

The Facts.- A Novelist's Autobiography, by Philip Roth (Farrar, Straus, 195 pp., $17.95

WE ARE NOW in midseason of the post-modern autobiography game; and so it is no wonder that Philip Roth-who has always been well aware of (if often indifferent to) the cut and jib of literary fashion, and who has, ever since Goodbye, Columbus anyway, mostly been writing close enough to the facts of his life to confuse friends and strangers alikeshould feel the need to come forward and offer a personal, factual accounting of himself one that, within reasonable limits, tells us a good deal about the truths of his real life as related to, and yet distinct from, the truths of his personal fictions. This is a process that has been consciously under way at least since 1975, when he produced Reading Myself and Others, a collection of interviews of Roth and essays by him that was described by the publisher as "chapters in the autobiography of a writer." And the character Nathan Zuckerman, a fictive yet Rothlike writer, has been around since the late Seventies, mostt recently in the complex metafiction The Counterlife (1987).

The Zuckerman of that novel furnishes the epigraph for this one. The autobiography opens with a letter from Roth to Zuckerman from which we learn (if we don't mind reading somebody else's mail) that this text was composed rather quickly, beginning after the spring of 1987, when "what was to have been minor surgery turned into a prolonged physical ordeal that led to an extreme depression that carried me right to the edge of emotional and mental dissolution." The letter is at once an explanation, an apology, and a request for critical reaction and guidance from Zuckerman. The book that follows is for Roth a general meditation on the subject o"where I had started out from and how it had all begun."

Essentially chronological, although with the full freedom in time and space of a deftly executed first-person narration, the story begins with his childhood in Newark in the Thirties and moves onward to the auspicious beginning of his professional career with Goodbye, Columbus (1959 up to and including the astonishing break through of Portnoy s Complaint (1969) -"a book," he tells us, "imprinted with a style and a subject that were, at last, distinctively my own." The truth is, he goes well beyond the time of Portnoy s Complaint whenever it is relevant to do so-as, for example, in his treatment of My Life as a Man (1974), which proved to be a supplementary "breakthrough" for Roth, as he was able, through the fictional Lucy Nelson, to deal with the real, if fantastical and troubled, character of his wife, Josephine Jensen. But essentially the story of The Facts is complete with the rousing success and scandal of Portnoy.

Following the letter to Zuckerman we have a "Prologue," chiefly devoted to honoring his living father and the memory of his mother. Next comes the core of the text, in five sequential chapters: "Safe at Home," treating his childhood and adolescence in Newark in the Thirties and Forties; "Joe College," recapitulating days at Bucknell during the early Fifties, with Roth moving and shaking among "the unrebellious sons and daughters of statusquo America at the dawn of the Eisenhower era, where, helped by some memorably good teachers, I acted, edited, wrote, stirred up a couple of controversies, and managed to get laid"; "Girl of My Dreams," recalling his time first as a grad student, then as an instructor at the University of

. . .. tified, intact, and hungry for literary distinction," and where he met and was hooked by his wife, the divorced mother of two and a few years his senior, whom he took to be both an ambassador from "the menacing realms of benighted American life that so far I had only read of in the novels of Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser," and "the legendary oldcountry shiksa-witch," whose accidental death some years later would cause him to whistle in the taxi taking him to the funeral home; "All in the Family," dealing with the troubles he had over the presumed self-hatred and antiSemitism of some stories in Goodbye, Columbus; and finally "Now Vee May Perhaps to Begin," picturing Roth in the Sixties, having an affair with an attractive gentile, becoming mildly involved in the turmoil of the times, getting free from the haunting of his wife, having a close encounter with death from a ruptured appendix, and managing to pull himself and a lot of things together in Portnoy. The final chapter of The Facts is a letter from Zuckerman to Roth, urging him not to publish this book, pointing out some flaws and problems, and changing everything slightly (again), turning the facts into fiction.

Those who follow Roth will learn some new and different things about him and the intricate relationship of his "real life" to his art. Because it is (except for a number of affairs with interesting women) a fairly calm and unadventurous life, its greatest strength is Roth's assertive honesty, supplemented by his sharp wit and edgy irony. That very honesty may hurt him with readers who are not sympathetic to his other work. For the character who emerges in these pages has self-centered habits of arrogance and is often ungenerous and overly judgmental.