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Was George Plimpton a Literary Giant?Uh, no. Why does Philip Roth insist on arguing that he was?

By Timothy NoahPosted Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2007, at 6:42 PM ET

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What's with Nathan Zuckerman's crush on George Plimpton? Readers of Exit Ghost will recognize that I'm referring to the extended critical reassessment of the late sportswriter and fireworks enthusiast that Philip Roth weaves into the climax of his novel. (For Stephen Metcalf's more comprehensive assessment of Exit Ghost, click here.) Yes, I know that Plimpton was also editor of the Paris Review, an important literary magazine. But Zuckerman focuses on Plimpton the writer. Yes, I am further aware that Zuckerman, the protagonist of a series of short novels of which Exit Ghost, Roth says, will be the last, is a fictional character who should not be mistaken for the author's proxy. Even so, Roth has always invited readers to take Zuckerman's literary sensibility more or less at face value. Zuckerman's ruminations about George Plimpton's underappreciated genius therefore left me scratching my head.

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I'm not the only one. "What is George Plimpton doing in this novel, whose other characters, apart from politicians, dead writers, and Norman Mailer, are presumably all fictional?" Hermione Lee asked in a New Yorker interview with Roth earlier this month. Roth replied that Plimpton is a device, a reference point by which Zuckerman identifies what he is not:

George Plimpton isn't an active, living character in my novel—he is another dead writer and is spoken of at length by Zuckerman, a literary friend of his, as a dead writer. […] Speculating on the meaning of Plimpton's success as America's leading "participatory journalist," and reflecting on the social ramifications of Plimpton's narrative perspective and the possible connections between Plimpton's social background and his subject matter, is hardly out of character for Zuckerman, a man whose life is books, not just writing them but uninterruptedly, over the decades, reading them and thinking about them. It is the news of Plimpton's death the year before—of which the reclusive Zuckerman was unaware—that prompts the longish rumination on Plimpton in the last chapter of Exit Ghost and that provides Zuckerman with an opportunity to ponder the radical difference between Plimpton's working days as a journalist occupationally engaged by the "great variety of life" and his own as a novelist, conducted of necessity alone and in silent seclusion. And prompts him to reach this conclusion: "Suddenly," Zuckerman thinks, "my way of being had no justification, and George was my—what is the word I'm looking for? The antonym of doppelgänger."

Well, sure. This is all spelled out rather explicitly in the novel, in Zuckerman's own narrative voice. But what's striking in Zuckerman's musings is the sentimental manner in which he inflates his polar opposite's legacy as a writer. Let me stipulate up front that I have nothing against Plimpton, whom I never met. By all accounts, he was immensely charming, generous, and high-spirited, and in the Paris Review he leaves behind a vital and necessary institution. As a writer, Plimpton was deft, and, in his most famous work, which required him to participate in and then write about professional sports, wonderfully enterprising. I have no quarrel with Zuckerman's description of Plimpton as "a playful, debonair, deeply inquisitive man of the world." But when Zuckerman muses about Plimpton's "lyricism" and "gravity," when he compares Plimpton to Mark Twain and to George Orwell—like Orwell, Zuckerman argues, Plimpton "tried to look straight at the thing and describe plainly what he saw and how it worked and so grasp hold of it for the reader"—I begin to wonder whether Roth's creation has taken leave of his senses. Just to be clear: Plimpton was neither a font of brilliant social commentary nor a composer of sentences so perfect that, like P.G. Wodehouse, he elevated silliness to art. Nor did he, in his patrician modesty, ever pretend to be. He was a guy who wrote pretty good magazine stories, some of which he expanded into pretty good books.

Zuckerman's fond appreciation seems all the more peculiar because the earlier Zuckerman novels were, among other things, vehicles for some very sharp cultural satire, with targets ranging from Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I (a best-selling memoir, published in 1945 and best-remembered today for introducing the characters Ma and Pa Kettle) to—in circumscribed fashion and remarkably good taste—The Diary of Anne Frank. Plimpton, with his antique upper-class accent and his penchant for name-dropping, might have made an ideal goyische target for Roth had he been the pompous sort, which apparently he wasn't. But neither was Plimpton anybody's beau ideal of a writer of nonfiction. If one were to compile a list of the 20^th century's finest journalists, it's doubtful he'd make the top 50.