Zuckerman Bound: a trilogy and epilogue

• refreshing to return to the Roth-verse. Clarity and thoughtfulness.
• “turning sentences around"

Lots of time passes ... I completely overhaul my website and travel down a million rabbit holes. Many notes were never to be taken on this sharp little set of novels.

THE ANATOMY LESSON

Zuckerman is dealing with the deaths of each of his parents. And estrangement from his brother. And is in a death spiral of a lack of productivity. And is drowing it all in a parade of the classic vices (that need not be notated.)

• p.285 — A head wasn't enough for Appel; he tore you limb from limb. Getting dismembered critically, and not literally, will be a death and rebirth for Nathan. Maybe.

Zuck is going to Chicago to become a medical doctor. Also to run from his harem, and his rivalry with the Harvard critic Appell, whom he telephoned in a fit of rage just before departing. Zuck is gradually smoking a joint in the airplane lavatory, disobeying the no smoking in this lavatory directive, and pretending to be a pornographer to his seatmate.

• p.350-3 — I laughed aloud during this entire section, reading it before dawn and the awakening of the house. He had a roommate who wore a cape.—He felt as if he's come out from the East by covered wagon, a removal that immense, that final. Just endless numbers of funny quotes here. Enrico Fermi giving a lecture. Thomas Mann speaking the most elevated English he'd ever heard.

Zuck is loaded out of his mind and gourd, commandeering a rented limousine, going to get his friend Bobby's father to take him to the graveyard to decorate his late wife's grave before the encroaching snow storm.

• p.412 — in the Chicago Tribune gossip column, Zuck is noted to have slipped into town to party at the Pump Room before undergoing cosmetic surgery. Just a nip & a tuck for Zuck.

  The last of the old fashioned fathers. And we, thought Zuckerman, the last of the old fashioned sons. Who that follows after us will understand how midway through the twentieth century, in this huge, lax, disjointed democracy, a father—and not even a father of learning of eminence or demonstrable power—could still assume the stature of a father in a Kafka story? No, the good old days are jost about over, when half the time, without even knowing it, a father could sentence a son to punishment for his crimes and the love and hatred of authority could be such a painful, tangled mess.

• This story needs to mostly be read through the lens of addiction. Was his pain even real?
• It ends on the note of a bitter acceptance of fate. That maybe the writer's "corpus" isn't so different from the doctor's.

THE PRAGUE ORGY

I'm leery of this episode, but I'm sure it'll all turn out fine.

Zuckerman is hosting a visiting outcast writer from Czechoslovakia. He is accompanied by an actress, who winds up runniing out. It seems like a plan is being hatched to get the writer's father's stories from his estranged wife in Prague. It is left unsaid WHY the writer has become an expat—running afoul of the Soviets is the stated reason.

You can f—, you can m—, you can look at dirty pictures, you can look at yourself in the mirror, you can do nothing. All the best people are there. Also the worse. We are all comrades now. Come to the orgy, Zuckerman—you will see the final stage of the revolution.