If it were only a matter of wit and intellect, Philip Roth's position as one of the masters of American fiction would be unquestioned. But egged on by some perverse internal logic, he has since Portnoy's Complaint usually resorted to the tactics of a schoolboy: playing pranks, defying conventions, alternately revering and mocking his elders, and scandalizing his peers. His new short novel, Zuckerman Unbound, is another extravagant complaint, this time putting the blame on fame, though certainly not exonerating, even on grounds of double jeopardy, the family….

The voice is familiar—the exasperation, edged with laughter, bordering on hysteria, of Portnoy's "Whew! Have I got grievances! Do I harbor hatreds I didn't even know were there!"—but we can't recognize the prose. The merriment and rollicking buffoonery of the controversial earlier novel are noticeably missing.

His sentences punctuated by an incredulity that reminds us of the maniacal nods by which comedian Woody Allen cues us in to the world's absurdities, Zuckerman embarks on a saturnine chronicle of the vexations a popular and talented writer is forced to endure…. His most adhesive fan and persecutor is Pepler…. (p. 36)

[The reader] may wonder why Roth has such patience for this objectionable figure, with his distressing confusion of personal vanity and racial pride, no doubt destined, with some justice, to provide one more argument in the Anti-Defamation League's dossier on Roth's mishandling of Jewish characters. But the temptation is all too clear—Pepler is the perfect catalyst for talents at which Roth has no peer: mimicry and derision….

While their speech is different, victim and victimizer are psychological birds of a feather, preening their egos and brooding over their good name. Both hoard compliments…. And both reason from paranoia, behaving as if they lived in a permanent stage of siege….

Though in his essays collected in Reading Myself and Others, Roth is quick to dismiss identity between author and hero, it is not hard to imagine that he harbors [thoughts similar to Zuckerman's]. Always plotting to scoop the critics and preempt their attacks, he permits one of the few characters he respects, Zuckerman's silvery-haired European agent, André Schevitz, to upbraid the novelist….

André and his wife Mary … are the chief prompters here in that never ending dispute that Roth conducts with critics like Irving Howe, with the Jewish community, and with himself about his ambivalence toward middle-class Jewish life. "You felt stultified writing 'proper, responsible' novels," André reminds him. "You set out to sabotage your own moralizing nature, and now that you've done it, and done it with the relish of a real saboteur, now you're humiliated, you idiot, because nobody aside from you seems to see it as a profoundly moral and high-minded act."

The reader probably will feel that he couldn't have said it better himself. Ever since Roth invented the conniving Private Sheldon Grossbart in the superb early story, "Defender of the Faith," he has been compulsively dwelling upon criticism of his treatment of Jewish characters, and devoting interviews, articles, and fictional episodes to defending himself…. The irony of the situation is that far from hating Jewish life, Roth has continuously immersed himself in it, and no other American writer has conveyed its pungent mixture of warmth, shrewdness, humor, and exclusiveness with greater resonance.

Yet there is something about his fiction that invites such reproaches. But the problem has less to do with ethnic loyalty than with his predilection for the ludicrous and the irascible in the human species, and his natural aversion (despite fascination with desire) to a romantic image of men and women. (p. 37)

In his early stories and novels, Roth was able to convince readers of his serious intent partly because he abided by the literary conventions; and the constraints of building plot and character already created some illusion of the author's faithful attention to the outside world. Since Portnoy's Complaint, however, Roth has summoned up only a perfunctory curiosity for the passing throng but a passionate intensity for the scrutiny of himself or his fictional alter egos, without learning from the master self-scrutinizers, Proust and Dostoevsky, to ponder his frailties in some larger context. His two genuine preoccupations have been with the writer's craft and the writer's ego….

Roth's sparkle and compelling style make it even more frustrating that the range of his interests should have become so narrow….

In the final section of Zuckerman Unbound, unlike anything in the rest of the book, Roth describes the hero's visit to his dying father in Florida…. It is an absolutely remorseless portrait of a professionally articulate man who cannot think what to say to a dying parent—and an extraordinary piece of writing….

Perhaps the moral of the book is a literary one. Having liberated himself so completely from the conventions and purposes of the old-fashioned novel—creating a sense of place, characters we can identify with, the security that diverse behavior is understood—Roth may choose to bind himself to them again. The writer who agitates us with the death scene in Zuckerman Unbound can write in still another and better way about life. (p. 38)