Plot twists occur too late to save this ‘Life’

What happens when one writer -- Danny Levitan, a fairly unsuccessful novelist whose career has been foundering for years -- is lured into writing the literary biography of another -- his good friend and writing mentor, Arthur Ziff, a man who’s achieved international acclaim, is hailed as the bad boy of American letters and one of our greatest living authors? What role will envy, jealously and the probability of a ruined friendship play in the creation of this biography?

“Ziff: A Life?,” a novel by Alan Lelchuk, takes readers into the heart of literary friendships to explore the conflicting emotions residing there. When is the price demanded by the publishing world simply too high, his story asks, or are all betrayals worthwhile if the brass ring of literary achievement is within one’s grasp?

Told from the point of view of Danny, the novel traces two narrative arcs. The first tells of Danny’s washed-out writing career, suddenly reinvigorated when his publisher suggests he take on the Ziff biography project. As if by magic, the world of publishing pays attention to Danny again, offering him huge advances and exclusives with the New Yorker. After years as a struggling, overlooked author, Danny can’t resist this heady rush, even if it’s simply because he’s the friend of the great man and not considered great himself. Danny undertakes the biography, knowing he’ll alienate his buddy of three decades yet willing to pay that price for one final shot at fame.

The second arc follows the long-standing and often turbulent friendship the men have shared, beginning in their younger years at writers’ colonies, taking lengthy walks together, discussing the works of their favorite writers, reading and commenting on each other’s manuscripts, all the while living up to their roguish images.

In the course of researching the biography, Danny uncovers details that reveal a man quite different than the Ziff he’s known. Arthur Ziff (whose character seems to be based loosely on writer Philip Roth) had earned the enmity of Jews for his mordant portrayal of the Jewish people in his fiction. Yet, Danny learns that Ziff has not only been anonymously donating to Jewish causes but has even been studying the sacred texts. Ziff has also earned a reputation as a man filled with bravado, one who delights in extreme sexual behavior and had been married to a great French film star in an inflamed, tabloid-inspiring union. The covert longing for spiritual enlightenment Danny uncovers in Ziff’s life -- coupled with many examples of do-good practices -- shocks and confounds the lesser writer. Instead of confirming Ziff as the literary rapscallion Danny knows, he encounters his friend “revealed in virtue.” This turn of events throws him for a loop, offering a scenario “[f]ar more bewildering than anything lewd....”

If, as Socrates postulated, the unexamined life is not worth living, this novel makes one wonder if the fictional life is worth examining, at least in biographical form. The entire plot, for instance, is predicated on the “unbelievable” quality of the revelations Danny uncovers about Ziff, aspects Danny considers so out of character as to throw into question everything he thought he knew about his friend.

Unfortunately, since readers know little of Ziff’s life and times (only what Danny tells us), the revelations come off as completely believable, as simply the complexity of the human animal who has within his heart both the best and the worst, the brightest and darkest of motives. Likewise, the book’s narrative tension is undercut regularly when Lelchuk uses much of Danny’s biography-in-progress within the text, filling the novel with first-draft manuscript pages that even Danny admits are in need of significant editing. Further slowing the pace are Danny’s painstaking explications of Ziff’s entire oeuvre and Danny’s assessments of where each work stands in the contemporary canon of American literature.

In all, it’s an avalanche of too much information, piled on too thickly, pulling our attention away from the story’s most intriguing questions, particularly whether Ziff has manufactured the benign persona Danny uncovers to further his own writing career. “With one book,” Ziff confides after the biography is published, “you did what I couldn’t do with twenty.... You made me out to be a good guy.”

To the author’s credit, the twists at the end of the novel are compelling, leaving questions deliciously unanswered about the nature of truth and our limited impressions of other people. Those twists, however, along with Lelchuk’s delightful insights into a writer’s envy and blind ambition, are not enough to breathe sustained life into the story. One of the beauties of the fictive dream is the spell of believability the author draws over the scene, reducing our need to question what’s presented. Lacking that scrim, this novel is a dream that only erratically takes flight.