Angstrom to Zuckerman (via Klíma)

Philip Roth says he has retired, but in fact the living master of literary doubles and doppelgängers is still at work: it’s just that instead of inventing doubles for himself in fiction, he is deploying actual living writers as his doubles, working through them — and probably ventriloquizing through them — the better to shape the reception of his life and work for posterity. He is permitting Blake Bailey to write a biography of him; and he let Claudia Roth Pierpont (whose name he couldn’t have contrived better) interview him at length for her new book Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books.

The New Yorker excerpted Roth Unbound, and the piece makes clear just how deep the doubling impulse runs in Roth’s career and our understanding of it. In just a few pages Roth is paired and compared with Milan Kundera; with Saul Bellow; and with John Updike, friend and rival, whose position relative to Roth’s prompts Pierpont to this masterly passage of comparative criticism:

The essential difference in the perspectives of Updike and Roth isn’t so much Christian versus Jewish, or believer versus non-believer, or small town versus city, though it involves all of these. Their greatest virtues as writers seem to arise from different principal organs of perception, which might be crudely categorized as the eye and the ear. Updike was a painter in words — he studied art for year, at Oxford — although the bleak loneliness of his vision is often closer to Hopper than to Matisse. Roth is the master of voices: the arguments, the joking the hysterical exchanges, the inner wrangling, the sound of a mind at work. There’s not a page by one that could be mistaken for a page by the other. But they are united in having spent a lifetime possessed by America. To go from Rabbit Angstrom to Nathan Zuckerman is in fact to go from A to Z in the history of the country after the Second World War — the years in which, as Roth has said, “America discovered itself as America.”

With Pierpont, Roth turned the Updike comparison into a joke, imagining “a series of books he might have written in the Updike manner: `Rabbi, Run,’ `Rabbi Redux,’ `Rabbi Is Rich,’” and so on.

And when, years ago, he needed to characterize a Czech novel for American readers, he compared it to a Kundera novel already renowned in the West:

I sometimes had the feeling while reading Love and Garbage that I was reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being turned inside out.

The author of Love and Garbage is Ivan Klíma, and Roth involved him in a particularly bold and deft act of doubling at just the moment when the United States and the Soviet Union were ceasing to be doubles in the Cold War. That’s a story all its own.

• 8 October 2013