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Exit Ghostby Philip Roth |
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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.
From Amazon.com Review:
The last ordeal of Nathan Zuckerman, the indomitable literary adventurer of Roth's nine Zuckerman books, 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.
Exit Zuckerman: Talking with Philip Roth
When we talked with Philip Roth for the Amazon Wire podcast, we asked him about his long relationship with his fictional surrogate, Nathan Zuckerman, his decision to bring Zuckerman back (and say goodbye to him) in Exit Ghost, and the difficulties of aging for novelists, and we managed to touch on George Plimpton, Annie Dillard, Grace Paley, and The Tempest, along with nearly all of the nine Zuckerman books. You can listen to interview in the podcast above, or read the full transcript.
Zuckerman Returns to Manhattan: Philip Roth Reads from Exit Ghost
When Nathan Zuckerman returns to Manhattan from his self-imposed rural retreat for the first time in 11 years in Exit Ghost, what does he find? Along with his surprising and unsettling encounters with an aged and ill woman who had once been a young mystery to him, an aggressive biographer who won't take no for an answer, and an alluring young writer who tempts him back into the adventure of seduction, he is confronted with a city whose streets are filled with people behaving quite differently than a decade before. "For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time," he thinks. "I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the street through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire." Listen to Philip Roth read an excerpt from Exit Ghost.
Looking Back on Zuckerman
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RANT AGAINST DEATH AND THE DEATH OF LITERATURE -  |
Exit Ghost Review |
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71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman, an established writer and thoughtful loner, hates cell phones and the narcissism of contemporary life, viewing himself as an "escapee from the coarse-grained world" of the Bush Administration and New York City after September 11, 2001 as well as of prostate problems and incontinence.
In a blink of an eye, Zuckerman finds himself attracted to Amy, a wealthy, married, 30-year-old woman while also trying to avoid Richard Kliman (Amy's former lover from college), a wanna-be biographer who threatens to destroy the reputation of Zuckerman's oldest and closest friend, a writer, now dead and forgotten, by the name of Lonoff, because of an incident of incest when the deceased writer was a teenager. In his struggles with his nemesis, Philip Roth allows us to read about one writer's well-thought-out views on literary tabloidism (which is Kliman's whole career project: personal scandal as a means of discussing literature or writers) and why great authors today necessarily are "ghosts" exiting a vanishing literary scene. This deep theme is starkly contrasted to the pathetic but humorously absurd theme of being an imperfect human being who, at 71, still has the heterosexual desires of the typical teenager. I can't imagine anyone under 50 really appreciating the perspective of this contemplative, self-aware, articulate septuagenarian (without finding it bleak or boring). For myself, as I approach 60, I admire any thoughtful writer willing to discuss the battle with deterioration and death without platitudes. Few there be! The "ghost exit" theme was perfect literary enjoyment. |
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Character driven novel w/focus on internal monologue -  |
Exit Ghost Review |
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Exit Ghost focuses on 71 year old Nathan Zuckerman, writer, thinker, hermit. He comes back to NYC after a 10yr retreat in his rural cabin.
Reading this novel, you become intimate with Zuckerman, his every thought and the rational behind every decision. There are long dialogues with other characters. If you're looking for action, this isn't it. Not much drama happening here, except that created by the characters in their own minds. Roth writes superb sentences. He summarizes situations profoundly in a few words. The structure and story hold together, and i like the devices Roth uses in writing the novel. It's a solid piece of work. Personally, it's my opinion that Roth portrays Zuckerman as Joyce portrays S. Daedalus. But Roth would hate that i'm expressing my opinion on his work, and that you're wasting your time reading my opinion. In a perfect literary world, critics wouldn't comment, and readers would consume only the author's work. |
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Lifeless, Often Dull, Coda to Nathan Zuckerman's Life and Career -  |
Exit Ghost Review |
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Having come across both Nathan Zuckerman - Philip Roth's fictional alter ego - and Roth's other work for years, I was eagerly awaiting "Exit Ghost" as the final chapter in Zuckerman's "life". What a final chapter it is, since it is more like a leisurely descent into a tedious half-hearted love affair between Zuckerman and a young Harvard-educated writer who is married to yet another young writer. While Roth still excells in writing fascinating dialogue and crisp prose, there's not much of a story to hang onto here, except for Zuckerman's precarious health, romantic fling, and an unexpected odyssey to look anew at the career of one of his mentors.
Roth incorporates in passing, much of the current cultural and political landscape, making obligatory nods to 9/11, the War on Terror and the 2004 presidential election. But, these are mere "obligatory nods", not thoughtful commentary on the state of our society as I have seen, for example, from acclaimed science fiction writer William Gibson in his recent novels "Pattern Recognition" and "Spook Country" (Indeed who would have thought that Roth's importance as a fictional commentator of our time would be overtaken by the very man who coined the term "cyberspace"?). Forget Zuckerman and Roth, unless you wish to read Roth's compelling alternate history novel, "The Plot Against America". |
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poignant, as always. - |
Exit Ghost Review |
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I LOVE Philip Roth for his brutal and often embarrassing honesty, his incredibly sharp insight into cultural phenomena and their absurdity about which most of people are oblivious. In Exit Ghost, the protagonist is alot more subdued than in previous Zuckerman books, however, his forced withdrawal makes his observations far more introspective, and his imaginations more personal. I also enjoyed cultural commentaries through his characters about the dangers of tainting literature by cultural journalism. |
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The past is prologue - |
Exit Ghost Review |
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This is Nathan Zuckerman's latest novel. For those who may not know, Nathan Zuckerman is Philip Roth's alter ego and is the protagonist in many of Mr. Roth's books. For a decade, Nathan has relocated from the fast paced, daily craziness that is Manhattan to the quietness and solitude of the Berkshires to enable him to better concentrate on his writing. Nathan sees an advertisement of a young, newly married couple who desire to swap their apartment in Manhattan with someone living in a more bucholic environment, far away from the city. Jamie, the young wife in this couple, lives in constant fear of a terrorist attack in post-9/11 New York.
Nathan, now 71, had come to New York for prostate surgery and, then, for post-surgical treatment for incontinence. A secondary effect from the surgery is impotence. Nathan, while in New York, spots from the distance an old friend, Amy Bellette, the lover of the late I.E. Lonoff, a distinguished writer and early hero to Nathan. Amy, once youthful and quite attractive, is old and sick now. Nathan wishes to have lunch with Amy to speak over old times. Nathan who would like to write Lonoff's biography, is in competition with Richard Kleiman for the job. Kleiman allegedly knows a scandalous secret of Lonoff's and is threatening to expose it in his intended biography. Having answered the young couple's ad and meeting with them, Nathan falls in love with Jamie and finds himself pining for her. Nathan is desparately smitten with her, but is extremely frustrated because of his chronic physical condition. Nathan is no longer the ladies's man he once was. Nathan tries to work out his dilemma by writing a story, which Nathan names, "He and She" which consists of a dialogue between the young woman with the much older man. It touches upon Nathan's current dilemma. Nathan also wishes to protect the infirm Amy from the annoyingly insistent Kleiman. It is interesting that when Nathan meets Lonoff, his wife, and Lonoff's sweetheart, Amy, Nathan is working on a novel, _Ghost Writer_ about a young woman visiting the Lonoffs who bears a strong resemblance to a famous and beloved Holocaust martyr. Nathan becomes obsessed with her both as a male and a Jew. What makes _Exit Ghost_ resonate so strongly with me is its keen sensitivity to the plight of the protagonist in his attempts to exorcise, or at least to reconcile, the ghosts of his past with the agonizing realities of the present. _Exit Ghost_ is palpably real and must be a particularly personal and heart felt work to Philip Roth. Therein lies the book's excellence. |
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