[In Zuckerman Unbound Roth] doesn't do much with the novel's main theme, which is, or should be, what it's like to be famous. The book veers off from this into some family matters—[Nathan Zuckerman's] fruitless attempt to win back the wife he's walked out on, the death of his father—which give the feeling of not being integral to any true narrative but rather devised to make up the appearance of one. Roth seems to me to be fulfilling an obligation to write another novel, the next one, and to have started with a creative idea, faltered, then filled out the book with some odds and ends of personal experience, perhaps taking care of some unfinished emotional business.

I'm not concerned with whether or not the novel's domestic events are actually part of Roth's autobiography (though there's evidence that they aren't remote from it). The point is that they feel like they are, because they don't feel like they're part of Zuckerman's. The novel's chief theme should be the nature of fame and celebrity; this isn't a fiat on my part but what the book itself advances for part of its way. Indeed, in an important episode Roth inadvertently reveals how he's thrown away the opportunity to make Zuckerman Unbound a better book than it is.

Nathan has a one-night affair with Caesara O'Shea, a screen goddess. In the course of the evening he looks through a book she's been reading, a little-known work by Kierkegaard called Crisis in the Life of an Actress and Other Essays on Drama. The title essay offers remarkable insights into the lures and oppressions of fame and is one of the shrewdest such inquiries I know. But Roth merely toys with it, using it for a bit of color, a bit of narrative embroidery. Had he regarded the essay seriously, taking it, let's say, as a set of notes or ideas for a fiction, we might have had a novel, a work of imagination about a psychic and social reality that has become increasingly insistent and enigmatic. Instead, this greatly gifted writer has given way to a need for justification and made the book sporadically serve that need. He's entitled, as one of his characters might say. But, then, so are we.

By the book's end, Nathan, Roth's surrogate, does feel justified. But he manages this in a way that leaves us greatly unsatisfied, with all the questions and ambiguities of celebrity unexamined. His father's death closes the past and, with that, Nathan's recent history is closed, too. He simply walks away from its disturbances, having assimilated what has happened to him, his status and luck. But it's by an act of will, not as the outcome of the creative flow. Roth wants to accept himself, wants to get off the high sea—the "virtue business," as Nathan calls it—so as to take himself, and be taken, for what he is, simply an entertaining writer. All right. But in this novel there is less entertainment than a self-conscious effort to establish the credentials of the entertainer; the life keeps getting in the way of the work. (p. 737)