Book description
Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has
changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left
eleven years before. Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly
makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude.
One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to
swap homes. From the moment he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to
swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jaime,
whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind:
intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.
The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy
Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary hero, E. I.
Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by
illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer
who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation. The third
connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a young literary
hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff's
"great secret". Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or
intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and
animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.
In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American
Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the
White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to
John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He
has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics
Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005
The Plot Against America received the Society of American
Historians' Prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an
American theme for 2003-2004."
Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006
the PEN/Nabokov Award 'for a body of work...of enduring originality
and consummate craftmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for
achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose 'scale of
achievement over a sustained career...places him or her in the highest
rank of American literature.'
Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published
in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The
last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.
