IN SCHOOL, THE TEACHER HELD A COMPOsition of mine up to the class when I was eight years old and said, “This little girl is going to be a writer.” At home—where Marx, socialism, and the international working class were articles of faith—my mother pressed my upper arm between two fingers and said, “Never forget where you come from.” Both events were formative. I grew passionate over writing, and the political-ness of life was never lost on me. In my youth these twin influences made me suffer. I thought them hopelessly oppositional, and was tormented by the suspicion that ultimately I need choose one way of knowing the world over the other. It was literature that spoke most thrillingly to what I was already beginning to call “the human condition,” but when social injustice stared me in the face it was easy enough to trade in emotional nuance for doctrinaire simplicity. So one day it was exciting to say to myself, “The only reality is the system”; the next, I’d pick up Anna Karenina, and the sole reality of the system would do a slow dissolve.

Suddenly, literature, politics, and analysis came together, and I began to think more inclusively about the emotional imprisonment of mind and spirit to which all human beings are heir. In the course of analytic time, it became apparent that—with or without the burden of social justice—the effort required to attain any semblance of inner freedom was extraordinary. Great literature, I then realized, is a record not of the achievement, but of the effort.

Jarrell once said that without literature human life was animal life. By literature, he meant, equally, both the writing of books and the reading of them. Reading, Jarrell thought, gave us back ourselves in a way that no other kind of non-material nourishment could match. In the ordinary dailiness of life we are alone in our heads, locked into a chaos of half-thoughts, fleeting angers, confused desires. When you read, the noise in your head clears out. You start having full thoughts. Full thoughts begin an internal conversation. Pretty soon, there are two of you in the room: you and your responding self. Now, you’ve got company, you’re connected. No longer do you feel alienated, not from yourself, not from others. Reading, therefore, is a supremely civilizing act.

The pity of it all is the loneliness trapped inside Roth’s radiant poison. In The Anatomy Lesson (by now it’s 1983) Nathan Zuckerman cries out, “How have I come to be such an enemy and a flayer of myself? And so alone! Oh, so alone! Nothing but self ! Locked up in me!” For Zuckerman, life, from beginning to end, is a howling wilderness. He is alone on the planet: alive but in solitary. All he has ever had to keep him company is the sexual force of his own rhetoric. Unchanged and unchanging, he struggles on, book after book, decade after decade, doomed to repeat in language that glows in the dark the increasingly tired narrative of the illness from which he can neither recover nor expire: his solipsism. He has succumbed to the danger inherent in closing the space between author and narrator; he has fallen in love with the inability to see himself in anyone other than himself, a development that leads inexorably to stasis.