ABSTRACT
The landscape is barren, cold, wintry white; daylight is fading. It seems a place for endings, for descent. escape. The "clapboard farmhouse" which sits "at the end of an unpaved road twelve hundred feet up in the Berkshires" is part of a time lost long ago, part of a pastoral America now all but vanquished (9). It is a place "where America began and long ago had ended," as the elder Nathan Zuckerman knows ( 11 ). Rather than a setting for renewal it is a setting for renunciation and departure. The two-hundred year old house is devoid of life. The words used to describe its interior are words of sterility: "plain," "pale," "bare," "colorless" ( 11 ). The trees and hills that surround the house act as a "barrier" to the outside world (38). Nature protects the house, guards it from civilization; "a thick green growth of rhododendron" and a "wide-stone wall" act like sentinels (38)
Ironically, it is into this emptiness that Zuckerman comes to find approval, acceptance, encouragement, and inspiration. From its opening Tfie Gfiost Writer revels in contradictions of this sort: The Jew living in "the goyisfi wilderness" ( 1 0), the writer who lives "away from all the Jews" and who writes only about Jews (67), the writer whose talent "made his every paragraph a little novel in itself" looking, in person, to be "out to lunch" (75).
