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Overview
Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.
Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.
The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman’s youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman’s first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation.
The third connection is with Lonoff’s would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff’s “great secret.” Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.
Haunted by Roth’s earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer’s insatiable commitment to fiction.
Synopsis
Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.
Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.
The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman’s youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman’s first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation.
The third connection is with Lonoff’s would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff’s “great secret.” Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.
Haunted by Roth’s earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer’s insatiable commitment to fiction.
The Barnes & Noble Review
We should have known he would not go gentle into that good night. From the moment Philip Roth emerged in print, almost 40 years ago now, his prose reveled in its coherent vitality. "Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare," Saul Bellow wrote at the time, "Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently. He is skilled, witty, energetic and performs like a virtuoso." How could something so exuberant ever die? But in recent years, as Roth surpassed middle age and then sailed into his 70s, he has begun to see death less as a joke and more like the mandate it is.
Editorials
Clive James
Exit Ghost is just too fascinating to leave alone…this book is latter-day Roth at his intricately thoughtful best…—The New York Times Book Review
Michael Dirda
This being Philip Roth, Exit Ghost manages some occasional laughter in the dark…and, again, this being Philip Roth, the novel is sometimes brutally sexual (the description of Jamie's past, whether imagined or actual). Above all, though, the book shows us a man trying to work with the cards that fate has dealt him—and to accommodate himself to the diminution of his mental and physical powers. In this struggle, any of us can see our own destinies, whether we are "no-longers" or "not-yets." As Leon Trotsky, no less, said with simple truth: "Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man."—The Washington Post
Michiko Kakutani
Mr. Roth has created a melancholy, if occasionally funny, meditation on aging, mortality, loneliness and the losses that come with the passage of time…Compared with Mr. Roth's big postwar trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain), which unfolded into a bold chronicle of American innocence and disillusionment, this volume is definitely a modest undertaking, but it has a sense of heartfelt emotion lacking in Everyman and Dying Animal, and for fans of the Zuckerman books, it provides a poignant coda to Nathan's story, putting a punctuation point to his journey from youthful idealism and passion through midlife confusion and angst toward elderly renunciation.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Philip Roth's 28th book is, it seems, the final novel in the Zuckerman series, which began in 1979 with The Ghostwriter. A 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after more than a decade in rural New England, ostensibly to see a doctor about a prostate condition that has left him incontinent and probably impotent. But Zuckerman being Zuckerman and Roth being Roth, the plot is much more complicated than it at first appears. Within a few days of arriving in New York, Zuckerman accidentally encounters Amy Bellette, the woman who was once the muse/wife of his beloved idol, writer S.I. Lonoff; he also meets a young novelist and promptly begins fantasizing about the writer's young and beautiful wife. There's also a subplot about a would-be Lonoff biographer, who enrages Zuckerman with his brashness and ambition, two qualities a faithful Roth reader can't help ascribing to the young, sycophantic Zuckerman himself. As usual, Roth's voice is wise and full of rueful wit, but the plot is contrived (the accidental meeting with Amy, for example, is particularly unbelievable) and the tone hovers dangerously close to pathetic. In the Rothian pantheon, this one lives closer to The Dying Animalthan Everyman. (Oct.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationLibrary Journal
In Roth's ninth installment in the Zuckerman saga, the reclusive author leaves his mountain retreat in the Berkshires to return to New York City for a promising new treatment for incontinence, a lingering reminder of his battle with prostate cancer. Almost immediately, Zuckerman is contacted by Richard Kliman, a brash young journalist who is working on a biography of the long-forgotten writer E.I. Lonoff, one of Zuckerman's mentors and the subject of Roth's first (and best) Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer(1979). Scandalous new details have emerged about Lonoff's sex life, and Kliman wants to break the story. Zuckerman resents Kliman's Zuckerman-like ambition, and argues heatedly that Lonoff's literary work is the only thing that matters. His private life is off limits. Meanwhile, Zuckerman becomes obsessed with a beautiful, wealthy young Texan and imagines an elaborate seduction, which he is simply too old and too sick to put into effect. While not one of Roth's strongest works, this novel has all the elements: unreliable narrators, authorial games, meditations on the use and abuse of literature, and a firm grounding in the reality of post-9/11 New York. Recommended for most fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/15/07.]
—Edward B. St. John
The Barnes & Noble Review
We should have known he would not go gentle into that good night. From the moment Philip Roth emerged in print, almost 40 years ago now, his prose reveled in its coherent vitality. "Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare," Saul Bellow wrote at the time, "Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently. He is skilled, witty, energetic and performs like a virtuoso." How could something so exuberant ever die? But in recent years, as Roth surpassed middle age and then sailed into his 70s, he has begun to see death less as a joke and more like the mandate it is.From Patrimony to Sabbath's Theater, on to The Dying Animal and now Exit Ghost, the sobering coda to his Nathan Zuckerman series, Roth has begun to explore just what that means for the aging. This project has required a series of complicated leave-takings, of which Exit Ghost is the third and most substantial. After all, Zuckerman has acquired a lot of baggage over the years and there are some knots to be untangled. Roth first introduced him in his elegantly tidy 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer, when Zuckerman was just a middle-aged novelist looking back on the pilgrimage he made in 1956 to the home of his writer hero, E. I. Lonoff. Zuckerman was then "twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman."
Three decades on, that Bildungsroman has indeed become truly massive. It stretches from Zuckerman's brush with fame in The Anatomy Lesson to his confusion over Israel in The Counterlife, on down through Roth's books of the late '90s, for which Zuckerman serves as a kind of mediating consciousness. Exit Ghost puts him back at the center of the tale, even as he has moved to the periphery of his world. Zuckerman, we learn, has spent 11 productive years in New England, eschewing controversy and romance for the sustaining embers of work. He is drawn back New York City for a bladder operation, to which he submits in hopes of "exerting somewhat more control over my urine flow than an infant."
Zuckerman's medical procedure -- and the fact that it has rendered him impotent as well -- sets the sad, blackly comic tone of Exit Ghost. Indeed, though the title of this novel comes from Macbeth, its presiding spirit is King Lear. Zuckerman wanders around New York as if it were his heath, bruised and bewildered, shocked to see how easily life in the city trundles on without him. In ten years, women's skirts have gotten shorter, and everyone has a cellular phone pressed to their ears. "What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say," Zuckerman wonders, "so much so pressing that it couldn't wait to be said?"
But that's just the easy stuff. Over the course of a few short days, Zuckerman has a series of interactions that don't just remind him how long he has been away, but what comes next. The first person Zuckerman thinks to visit is dead. The first acquaintance he runs into is Lonoff's ex-lover, Amy Bellette, who has just emerged from brain surgery, her skull marked by "a raw, well-defined scar that curved from behind her ear up to the edge of her brow." She is a mockery of Zuckerman's lusty memories of her. Later, they meet to talk of old days, and Zuckerman sees her at the foot of her dingy walk-up, "now even more pitiful to behold in a long shapeless lemon-colored dress meant to exude gaiety" but which does quite the opposite.
Rather than flee back north, Zuckerman extends his stay and gets bitten by the New York bug of new beginnings. At a restaurant, in between changing his Depends, he spies an ad in The New York Review of Books for an apartment swap, and he leaps into action. The apartment is occupied by two young writers, Richard and Jamie, a woman so gorgeous the reader knows immediately a whole new mockery of Zuckerman is about to begin. Immediately after he signs on for a year in their apartment, Zuckerman begins to receive phone calls from Kliman, an arrogantly self-assured biographer who wants to resurrect Lonoff's career by breaking a sordid story about the late writer's sexual history. His evidence? Extracts of a novel Lonoff never finished, which suggest an incestuous relationship with his sister. The affront of it all drives Zuckerman into action and back to his desk, where he begins writing a series of dialogues between himself and Jamie, with Kliman playing a minor role.
Though Zuckerman's powers of persuasion have waned, his creator's have aged well. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Zuckerman's playlettes, which Roth splices right into the text without much throat-clearing from Zuckerman and nothing but dialogue to move it forward. Even though we know these conversations are fictional, it's hard not to believe in them, to not care what happens, to not grow anxious by the extramarital tension Zuckerman works up toward -- no surprise -- a slightly pornographic froth. Here is Zuckerman's subtle but powerful rejoinder to Kliman's biographical mode: watch me create something out of nothing. On the page it is true -- and yet in the real world there is no relation to fact whatsoever.
In addition to these bravura dialogues, throughout Exit Ghost there are passages of vintage Roth, narrative paragraphs that stretch across two pages, climbing toward revelations about aging and the literary game which would seem minor were they not so perfectly described. Kliman and Zuckerman's first true argument, which takes place by the Central Park reservoir, is one of the best scenes Roth has written. "Back in the drama," Zuckerman thinks after it concludes, "back into the turmoil of events!... There is the pain of being in the world, but there is also the robustness. When was the last time I had felt the excitement of taking someone on?" The argumentative gusto of Roth's fiction has always made his novels, even the best of them, somewhat exhausting to read. One finishes The Counterlife banged and embattled, wrung-out. At the end of Sabbath's Theater, if you haven't shed a tear or two in laughter (and in grief) it's time to check your pulse. Though it possesses some of the same postmodern mirroring and investigates some of the same themes as these books, Exit Ghost is not nearly such a house aflame. Long before the situation with Jamie or Kliman gets out of control, Zuckerman knows well enough to step aside, to slip out the back entrance and back to his desk. This wily, elegant, sobering book reminds us -- all over again -- that is where the true art happens, until it stops. --John Freeman
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle. He is writing a book for Scribner on the tyranny of email.