Ever since his brilliant debut in 1959 with “Goodbye, Columbus,” Philip Roth has been a writer to watch and sometimes agonize over. He outraged the Jewish community with “Portnoy’s Complaint” (many accused him of Jewish self-hate) and then went on to write books about two characters, Nathan Zuckerman, a young writer apparently based on Roth, and Jonathan Kepesh, a professor with fleshly interests, who in “The Breast” goes Kafka one better when he wakes up one morning transformed into a woman’s breast.
Along the way Roth wrote an autobiography called “The Facts,” as well as “The Plot Against America,” in which a Roth family appears in an America given over to the Nazis during World War II.
Astonishingly prolific, Roth has been awarded every important literary prize given in this country, but some critics remained disappointed that he hadn’t topped himself, hadn’t yet written the ultimate novel of the American experience. Of course, it’s unfair to demand this of any writer, but critics need work. Perhaps recognizing this, in 1973 Roth published a book called, ironically, “The Great American Novel,” whose opening (“Call me Smitty”) parodies Melville.
Roth’s reach as a writer and public intellectual has been amazing. He illustrated his commitment to writers in other cultures, in the 1960s, serving as editor of a series called “Authors of the Other Europe,” which introduced Milan Kundera, Tadeusz Borowski, Bruno Schulz and others to American readers. Still, no one can write as much as Roth has and succeed each time out.
Books like “Our Gang,” “When She Was Good,” “Everyman” and “Deception” are seldom included in serious discussion of Roth’s oeuvre, and for good reason. But taken as a whole, his career has been one of breathtaking achievement. He is the only American writer who can be considered a legitimate candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature.
All of which is to say that his new book, “Exit Ghost,” forms a part of a continuing literary conversation between Roth and his readers, as well as the latest installment of the Zuckerman saga.
When last we saw Zuckerman, in “The Human Stain,” he had secluded himself in the Berkshire Hills while recovering from prostate cancer surgery. “Exit Ghost,” which takes its title from a stage direction in “Macbeth,” picks things up 12 years later when Zuckerman, nearly a ghost himself, has decided to descend from his aerie because of the hope that a new procedure can if not reverse his incontinence at least improve it. Roth does not spare us the gory details of a life that relies on Depends to maintain personal dignity, but somehow the recitation of his daily ritual comes to seem not disgusting but important. And we see his return to New York from the hinterlands not as an act of desperation but as an indication of hope in the last act of a ruined life.
Nevertheless, Zuckerman experiences culture shock after so long in isolation. “I’d been alone these past eleven years in a small house on a dirt road in the deep country … I don’t go to dinner parties, I don’t go to movies, I don’t watch television, I don’t own a cell phone or a VCR or a DVD player or a computer … and have no idea what the World Wide Web is. I no longer bother to vote. I write for most of the day and often into the night. I read, mainly the books that I first discovered as a student, the masterpieces of fiction.”
Sounds nice, but the allure of Manhattan, the sheer busyness of 12 million people has its charms, and after seeing the urologist, Zuckerman checks into a hotel to stay for a while, especially since there are multiple stages to the treatment. He goes out to a favorite neighborhood restaurant and takes along a magazine in which he reads an advertisement by a couple that wants to swap their Manhattan apartment for a place in the country. Shellshocked by 9/11 and what they see as the dissolution of the country, the couple, both writers, want to escape. On a whim, Zuckerman calls the number in the ad and agrees tentatively to trade his retreat for their small apartment.
It helps for readers of “Exit Ghost” to be familiar with the other Zuckerman books, especially the “Ghost Writer,” Roth’s brilliant 1979 novel about a young acolyte devoted to an aging genius named Lonoff, based perhaps on Bernard Malamud or Saul Bellow.
On an overnight visit, Zuckerman becomes aware of Lonoff’s relationship with a beautiful young Holocaust survivor named Amy Bellette and in Zuckerman’s fantasy Amy becomes Anne Frank, who has miraculously survived the Nazis. Yet even those who haven’t read the earlier novel will pick up the thread soon enough because most of the middle of “Exit Ghost” is made up of Zuckerman’s surprise encounter with a much older Amy who is now suffering from brain cancer.
As terrible as her illness is, however, Amy’s real problem is that she’s being besieged by a young biographer who wants her to cooperate in telling Lonoff’s story, something she sees as being akin to betrayal. She enlists Zuckerman’s help, but it turns out he’s on the biographer’s radar screen, as well. And if this weren’t enough, the biographer becomes aware of Zuckerman’s presence through the young couple, who were classmates of his at Harvard.
Criticizing the critics
Although the integration of all this into a seamless narrative leaves something to be desired, the structure he’s created gives Roth a chance to rail against biographers, literary critics and cultural journalists.
“The writer works alone for years on end, stakes his or her everything on the writing, pores over every sentence sixty-two times, and yet is without any sort of overriding literary consciousness, understanding, or goal. Everything the writer builds, meticulously, phrase by phrase and detail by detail, is a ruse and a lie. The writer is without literary motive … The writer’s guiding motives are always personal and generally low … The way in which serious fiction eludes paraphrase and description … is a nuisance to your cultural journalist. Only its imagined sources are to be taken seriously.”
In an age in which gossip has taken the place of news, it’s easy to see the truth of Roth’s screed. As a culture, we are wary of seriousness and always in a hurry. Yet Roth, and for that matter Zuckerman, would be without subjects were it not for the trivia and subjectivity of modern life, and few writers have the ear for the rhythm of common speech that Roth has.
In any case, Roth wouldn’t be Roth without sexual themes running through his books. “Exit Ghost” is no exception. Zuckerman may be impotent in addition to being incontinent, but this has done nothing to his ability to fantasize, and it doesn’t take him long to become besotted by the young woman to whom he’s planning to sublet, to the point of creating long, imagined dialogues with her as well as speculations on her life and loves. Which is part of the problem with this involved and brilliant book. There’s so much going on that even a writer as gifted as Roth can’t really pull it all together in fewer than 300 pages, especially toward the end he goes off on tangents about other writers and provides a long and moving account of George Plimpton’s funeral and Norman Mailer’s appearance there. The medical procedure that brought Zuckerman to Manhattan now seems almost an afterthought. And at the end of the novel, Nathan goes back to the Berkshires, leaving the young couple, Amy and his hopes for a rejuvenated self behind.
The pilgrim’s progress he describes, replete with suffering and the hope of renewal, is moving and exhausting, and at the end of the novel the reader feels sure Zuckerman has made the right choice. Roth has said this is the last we’ll see of Zuckerman, and after eight novels, one can understand his wish to leave him to his own rewards. Still, for those of us who’ve been with Zuckerman since “The Ghost Writer” there is a sense of loss, the slight wish Zuckerman will get to Pittsfield, change his mind and give New York another try.
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
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Fiction
Exit Ghost
By Philip Roth, $26
