conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND about Zuckerman, Nathan, Manhattan with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Now in his mid-thirties, Nathan Zuckerman, a would-be recluse despite his newfound fame as a bestselling author, ventures onto the streets of Manhattan in the final year of the turbulent sixties. Not only is he assumed by his fans to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky, but he also finds himself the target of admonishers, advisers, and literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., lead an unsettled Zuckerman to wonder if 'target' may be more than a figure of speech. In Zuckerman Unbound - the second volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound - the notorious novelist retreats from his oldest friends, breaks his marriage to a virtuous woman, and damages, perhaps irreparably, his affectionate connection to his younger brother...and all because of his great good fortune.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: and all because of his great good fortune. Not only is he assumed by his fans to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky, but he also finds himself the target of admonishers, advisers, and literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., lead an unsettled Zuckerman to wonder if 'target' may be more than a figure of speech. In Zuckerman Unbound - the second volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound - the notorious novelist retreats from his oldest friends, breaks his marriage to a virtuous woman, and damages, perhaps irreparably, his affectionate connection to his younger brother...Now in his mid-thirties, Nathan Zuckerman, a would-be recluse despite his newfound fame as a bestselling author, ventures onto the streets of Manhattan in the final year of the turbulent sixties.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book titled ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND about Zuckerman, Nathan, Manhattan with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Zuckerman Unbound: The novel parallels several real events in Roth\'s life, including the publication of his 1969 novel Portnoy\'s Complaint and the hoopla which surrounded Roth in the wake of that novel\'s fame.\nBy analogy, in Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman has achieved meteoric acclaim and notoriety with "Carnovsky", a coming-of-age sex romp that differs remarkably from Zuckerman\'s previously Jamesian fiction.\nThe extent to which the details of the Zuckerman character can be safely compared to those of Roth has been a subject of zealous debate among Roth\'s readers.\nRoth himself has weighed in on the debate, both in interviews and within his fiction.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Zuckerman Unbound
  In Rosemary's hall closet Laura kept her correspondence files. Guarding them from an F.B.I. break-in had given the lonely woman something to live for. So had Laura. For three years Laura had been mothering Rosemary like a daughter: accompanied her to the optometrist, took her to the hairdresser, weaned her from sleeping pills, baked the big cake for her seventieth birthday...
  Zuckerman found he had to sit down, thinking of that endless list and the good woman who'd drawn it up.
  Rosemary sat too, though she wasn't happy about it. Her chair was the Danish chair from his study, the old reading chair he had left behind. The battered Moroccan ottoman at her feet had also been his before the move uptown.
  Rosemary's hands had always trembled, and Zuckerman's answers weren't helping. She still looked like she could use a good meal. Sometimes Laura had come to sit with her when she had dinner, just to be sure she ate something.
  Laura had radicalized Rosemary—no mean job, either. Under the influence of her late bachelor brother, an Air Force colonel, Rosemary used to receive in her mailbox the publications of the John Birch Society; now she harbored Laura's files and worried about the welfare of her war resisters. And thought of Zuckerman as... as what? Did that matter to him too, Rosemary Ditson's judgment?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Henry was still talking at seven a.m. when Carol had phoned. She didn't know what she'd done wrong and begged him to come home. Zuckerman picked up the extension to listen in. Henry was crying and Carol was pleading. "—you wanted plants like your grandmother had in her living room, I gave you plants. One day you said something about having had eggs in an eggcup as a kid on a vacation in Lakewood—the next morning I presented your boiled egg to you in an eggcup. And you were like a kid, so sweet, so delighted, so content from such a little thing. You couldn't wait until Leslie was old enough so you could begin to call him 'son.' You didn't wait. You used to lie on the floor with him and let him chew on your ear and you were in seventh heaven. You used to call out the door when dinner was ready, 'Son, come on home, time to eat.' You did it with Ruthie. You still do it with Ellen. You rush to do it when I say the food is ready. 'Little girl, come on, supper.' Ruthie plays 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' on her violin, and you, you fool, you're in tears, you're so happy. Leslie tells you that everything is made out of molecules, and you're so proud you're repeating it all night to anybody who calls. Oh, Henry, you are the softest, gentlest, kindest, most touching man there is, in your heart you are really the simplest man in the world to satisfy—"
  Softest, gentlest, kindest. Responsibility. Generosity. Devotion. That's how everybody spoke of Henry. I suppose if I were Henry with his heart I wouldn't jeopardize it, either. It probably feels very good being so good. Except when it doesn't. And that probably feels good in the end too. Self-sacrifice.
  A hand came gently down on Nathan's shoulder—Essie's dapper, tanned, well-meaning husband. "Finish the story," said Mr. Metz softly. "You're telling it beautiful."
  He turned back to his father: no closer to death, though just as far from life. "Dad, listen to me, if you can." For whatever it was worth, Nathan smiled at him too. Last smile. "Dad, there's now a theory... if you can follow me."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Across the street, the tailor shop had become a store for idol worshippers—holy statuary on display in the window, along with other "Spiritual Supplies." The corner storefront, once a grocery, was now owned and occupied by the Calvary Evangelistic Assembly, Inc. Four stout black women with shopping bags were standing and talking at the bus stop. In his early childhood, four black women at the bus stop would have been domestics up from Springfield Avenue to clean for the Jewish women in the Weequahic neighborhood. Now they left the neighborhood, where they themselves lived, to clean for the Jewish women in the suburbs. Except for the elderly trapped in nearby housing projects, the Jews had all vanished. So had almost everyone white, including the Catholic orphans. The orphanage appeared to have been converted into some sort of city school, and there was a small new nondescript building on the corner where the truck farm had been. A bank. Looking around, he wondered who banked there. But for candles, incense, and holy statuary, nothing seemed to be for sale any longer on Lyons Avenue. There didn't seem to be anywhere to buy a loaf of bread or a pound of meat or a pint of ice cream or a bottle of aspirin, let alone a dress or a watch or a chair. Their little thoroughfare of shops and shopkeepers was dead.
  Just what he wanted to see. "Over," he thought. All his lyrical feeling for the neighborhood had gone into Carnovsky. It had to—there was no other place for it. "Over. Over. Over. Over. Over. I've served my time."
  He had the driver cruise slowly down the block toward Chancellor Avenue, the way he'd walked each morning to school. "Stop," he said, and looked up an alleyway between two houses to the garage where the superintendent's wayward daughter, Thea, and the grocer's daughter, Doris, had enticed him one day by telling him how pretty he was. 1939? 1940? When they shut the garage doors he feared the worst—his mother had warned him that Thea was too "developed" for her age, and no one had to remind him that she was Christian. But all Thea made him do was stand beside a big black grease spot and repeat everything she said. The words meant little to him but a great deal obviously to Thea and the grocer's daughter, who couldn't stop giggling and hugging each other. It was his first strong experience of the power of language and of the power of girls; as the orphanage fence beyond his bedroom window was the first momentous encounter with caste and chance, with the mystery of a destiny.
  A young black man, his head completely shaved, stepped out of one of the houses with a German shepherd and stared down from the stoop at the chauffeur-driven limousine in front of his alleyway, and at the white man in the back seat who was looking his place up and down. A chain fence surrounded the three-story house and the little garden of weeds out front. Had the fellow cared to ask, Zuckerman could without any trouble have told him the names of the three families who lived in the flats on each floor before World War II. But that wasn't what this black man wished to know. "Who you supposed to be?" he said.