Saturday, February 17, 2018

Ten top novels about novelists

Lisa Halliday grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts and currently lives in Milan, Italy. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review and she is the recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for Fiction. Asymmetry is her first novel.

One of ten novels about novelists the author tagged at Publishers Weekly:
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth

The first of Philip Roth’s novels narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer also features established novelist E.I. Lonoff, whom young Zuckerman visits in the country during a snowstorm and stays the night. “…I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman…” By Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman is suffering his fame for having written the Portnoy-like novel Carnovsky; ominously, the epigraph to the second Zuckerman book is a line spoken by Lonoff to his wife in the first: “Let Nathan see what it is to be lifted from obscurity. Let him not come hammering at our door to tell us that he wasn’t warned.”
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue