This is the first novel in Roth's Zuckerman trilogy, about Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. In 1950s, when Nathan, 23, a budding story teller, was invited by E. I. Lonoff- alledgedly patterned after Bernard Malamud- his literary idol, in his New England house, he met the great writer, his wife, and his former student, a girl who thought that she was Anne Frank. Through a series of vignettes, the novel ponders on the chasm between life and literature, the quandary between responsibility to one's art versus responsibility to one's race or family , and the usefullness or futility of sacrificing one over the other.
I think we can sum up the novel's thesis by the motto pasted on E. I. Lonoff's den:
"We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." - Henry James