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This is the truth.
I do not think that Philip Roth would be happy with what we are doing tonight. But I cannot know this for sure. You see it is Nathan Zuckerman who tells us that the search for the real in the world of fiction is no less than the “retribution of biographical inquisition” (Roth, 2007, p. 275), a confusion that overvalues the author's life over the author's imagination. But I confess that Solange Leibovici's quest for the “real” Philip Roth has pulled me in. For the last several weeks, I have been immersed in the world of Nathan Zuckerman, of his fears and his fantasies, and I too have been wondering: How much Roth is in Zuckerman? Leibovici's highly sophisticated excavation of clues is not just detective work; she invites us to become literary psychoanalysts. Roth's stories, she tells us, are introductions to his personal “ghosts”—she believes that the important characters that preoccupy his fictional world may also occupy his non-fiction reality. They are doppelgangers that communicate important affective experiences, multiple-self states, delusions, memory, and dreams. Repetitively and variously, as mirrors and substitutes, as enemies or broken idols, Leibovici tells us that each may be a representation of Roth's inner life and external world. Raising and toppling the powerful actors, the highly evocative narratives that seem to mirror aspects of Roth's life show us figures as they fall, disappear, and reemerge. Readers are seduced into a repetitive mystery, not only of the story that is written, but the story of Roth. Inexorably, we are drawn into a mise en abyme, a uniquely Rothian fall into an abyss.