Ziff: A Life?: A Novel

by Alan Lelchuk

A Life? is the latest tour de force by an extraordinary novelist with explosive verbal energy and intelligence, sexual sensibility, and drive, who has been acclaimed by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Wallace Stegner. Who is Arthur Ziff? One of our greatest living writers or an impertinent provocateur? A true literary master or a clever tactician who seduces the reading public? It is narrator Danny Levitan's job to find out who Ziff really is, in a compelling novel about the writing life that is at once comic and provocative, producing a memorable reading experience. Sensational publishing and serious literature collide when Levitan, a has-been writer, is offered a hefty advance to write a biography of Ziff, the scourge of myriad Jewish-American readers and a titan among the world's literary giants. For years, Ziff has been sharing secrets, manuscripts, and sexual escapades with his longtime and less successful friend Danny. But, old friendships aside, Ziff hardly welcomes an incendiary study of his life, and is determined to thwart Danny, with legal roadblocks and personal humiliation. Danny must decide whether to accept the advance and risk the rollercoaster of recriminations that will surely follow. He recounts with humor and often wrenching anguish his journey of discovery into the land of Ziff, and the hard-won truths he finds there—original insights into a man who has crafted his novels, often savagely, from the lives of his friends, including Danny's life. An unabashed look at the ruthless forging of literary careers and a heady brew of books within a book, A Life? will enthrall readers of great fiction everywhere and anyone eager for a peek through the keyhole of contemporary literary celebrity.

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Angie Gazdziak · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was awful. So awful, in fact, I had forgotten that I read it over ten years ago because I had blocked it from my memory. It's terrible. Unsympathetic characters, shiteous writing, a poorly crafted plot, and nothing that actually drives the plot, save for a bombastic subject whose self-aggrandizing made me want to find him and run him down with my car. I have never been so mad at myself for reading a book. Don't start it and assume it will get better. It won't.