Z/R

John Banville

  • Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
    Cape, 292 pp, £16.99, October 2007, ISBN 978 0 224 08173 3

A large part of the reason for the continuing democratic vigour of the American novel is that the great wave of Modernism was no more than a ripple by the time it reached New England’s shores. American writers simply did not have the time or energy to spare for all that self-scrutiny and existential doubt, that Eliotian difficulty. There was a job to be done, in that the young nation was still engaged in forging itself – as, indeed, it still is – and novelists saw themselves as the chief chroniclers of that process, in full awareness of the ambiguity of the verb ‘to forge’. As Norman Mailer used vociferously to demand, who will analyse the analysts, if not the artist?

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[*] Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue 1979-85, edited by Ross Miller (Library of America, 645 pp., $35, October, 978 1 59853 011 7).

Vol. 29 No. 19 · 4 October 2007 » John Banville » Z/R (print version)
Pages 23-24 | 3012 words