Is Zuckerman Unbound a success? The answer, unfortunately, is no. What Roth has always done well, he does as scintillatingly as ever. His dialogue rings true; his prose is crystalline. His talent for the outrageous flourish is as devastating as ever…. If nothing else, Zuckerman Unbound is dependably funny.

As deftly as any other writer, Roth can also capture a sense of psychic claustrophobia, the feeling of being trapped because one is a member of a family, or a success, or a Jew. Perfect strangers, as well as unloved relatives, presume that they understand Zuckerman, that he in turn will be automatically sympathetic to them and will feel indebted because of a label someone else has affixed to him…. In The Ghost Writer, Roth quoted Anne Frank's diary despairingly: "The time will come when we are people again, not just Jews."

But Zuckerman Unbound fails ultimately, and Roth seems aware of its failings because he puts criticisms of them into the mouths of crackpots and psychopaths, dismissing and lampooning such cavils. A crazed extortionist over the telephone summarizes Zuckerman's work: "Flash, yes; depth, no." (pp. 30-1)

Further, the book is a catalogue of the unpleasantness that can accompany success…. Roth, in short, is aware of many sins. But the act of acknowledging one's errors does not excuse them.

Roth understands Zuckerman Unbound's chief failing as well. Ever since Goodbye Columbus, he has been writing about the intolerability, the impossibility of a life committed to satisfying the demands of others. And he has shown that he is well aware of the pain writing can cause. Zuckerman analyzes himself as: "coldhearted betrayer of the most intimate confessions, cutthroat caricaturist of your own loving parents, graphic reporter of encounters with women to whom you have been deeply bound by trust, by sex, by love…."

Zuckerman, however, is more than a mere traitor in the name of art. He cannot acknowledge any sympathy or even respect for his past, his heritage, his father. His father dies and Zuckerman's brother is devastated. Zuckerman, meanwhile, feels liberated: "He was no longer any man's son."…

Can one's history be so easily cast off and dismissed? Does success liberate the present from claims of the past? Freud convinced us that we never entirely escape our roots; psychoanalysis continues to teach that it is possible to live with guilts and memories but never possible to escape from them. Yet Roth shows Zuckerman declaring his liberation with no indication that the perception is wrong….

But if such struggles are indeed resolvable, why is Roth still writing about the (supposedly invalid) claims of the past on the present after 12 books? If Roth himself has passed beyond this question, why does it still nag at him until it has provoked yet another novel after a quarter century of writing?…

The nature of Zuckerman's deepest inner response (and Roth's, too, one feels) is hidden from the reader; the questions are asked, but the glib answer Roth offers is inadequate.

It is unfair, perhaps, to demand that an artist eviscerate his psyche for our entertainment and edification. It's one of those claims on the artist that Roth argues a stranger has no right to make. And in fact, Roth's next novel will follow Zuckerman to Europe, so perhaps the issue is far from settled. Perhaps Zuckerman Unbound is a chapter in a saga that will ultimately ring true and resound deeply once it is completed. Given only this novel, however, the reader feels like an accessory to the ridiculed extortionist who laments, "Flash, yes; depth, no." (p. 31)