Exit Ghost
by Philip Roth
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Book Reviews of Exit Ghost
Book Review: Roth Takes Down the NY Literary Scene
Summary: 5 Stars
Philip Roth is an authentic literary treasure and if you like reading difficult books, reading everything Mr. Roth writes is worthwhile. "Exit Ghost" is no exception to this claim. Read it and enjoy it.
"Exit Ghost" returns to one of Mr. Roth's most interesting characters, Nathan Zuckerman. The past Zuckerman novels, but particularly those in the "Zuckerman Bound" collection, have delighted with their deadly irony and sardonic perspective. In "Exit Ghost" the skillful and often hilarious point of view is absent. The book feels trapped within itself as if for once, Mr. Roth might be actually and sincerely speaking through Zuckerman rather than shaping him for artistic purposes. That's not to say that any of the physical or psychological attributes given to Zuckerman are true of Mr. Roth, but rather it is the philosophy of Zuckerman might reflect truly Mr. Roth's ideas.
Mr. Roth has always rejected such autobiographical interpretations of his fictional work and might categorize such thinking as droppings from the "lice of literature." But, "Exit Ghost" lacks that sarcastic irony evident in the prior Zuckerman novels (again, especially the Zuckerman Bound collection). And, it also lacks the energy, the drive, the mania even with a maniac character, Kliman (certainly a swerve on "clinamen" just as Amy Bellette swerves on belle lettres) so dominant in the Zuckerman Unbound collection. Instead the Zuckerman of "Exit Ghost" seems to be the most literal and the most drained of men. He should be wearing a gray flannel suit, a strap-hanger on a Manhattan subway. There's no vitality, verve, pop, anger, mordant wit, irony, self deprecation. Zuckerman seems to be an old man trapped in an old man's body.
So, has Mr. Roth lost his wit?
Perhaps, if you stay within the story and interpret everything in a straightforward fashion.
However, this could be a mordant takedown of the modern (or postmodern?) literary world. We have many "types" from the literary scene: the dead, beloved, but forgotten great writer (Lonoff); the nearly dead unloved and almost unremembered great writer (Zuckerman); the adoring starstruck girl with a past (Amy Bellette); the young liberal literary wannabes hating George Bush, but living on oil money inheritance (Jamie and Billy); the angry critic who lacks all literary credential except ambition (Kliman).
No one gets out of the novel "alive." The characters are either dead, dying, or trapped in their own literary foolishness. Lonoff got killed by the novel he couldn't complete because writing really is hard work. Kliman aspires to write a tell all biography of the dead Lonoff that tells all about a wildly surmised sexual deviance, thus seeking the Warhol 15 minutes of fame. Jamie Logan has written one short story published five years earlier in the New Yorker and hasn't written a good word since. Her husband, Billy, wants to write only to be with Jamie (and probably her trust fund). Amy Bellette flew too close to the literary flame as a young girl and ended up giving her life to the memory of a writer dead for 30 years. And Zuckerman, due to prostate cancer surgery, is both impotent and incontinent, and between books.
No one is admirable, lovable, wise, or even interesting. Lonoff wrote great short stories, but what writer would want that on the tombstone? Zuckerman may be great although he's attracted more controversy and sales leaving the reader to doubt any lasting legacy of greatness in his work. Jamie and Billy represent the new generation of writers. Billy doesn't and probably can't write, but through his marriage has the economic wherewithal to hang out in the literary scene. Jamie despises her parents and their traditional values, but sees absolutely no irony in taking their trust fund money while she plays at being a writer with a five year old publication. Billy and Jamie think they need to get out of New York City and live in the mountains to avoid Osama Bin Laden and get the time and quiet they need to produce. And Zuckerman is a prisoner to his penis even though the only thing that comes out of it is urine and just like an orgasm, he can't control the flow.
If this interpretation of "Exit Ghost" is wildly incorrect, then we're left with a rather boring story of an old man struggling with age (gee, it's not as much fun as you expected?!?) who seems to have learned nothing substantial about life, work, and women.
I'll take ironic Roth and sardonic Zuckerman.
Book Review: Roth Takes on the State of Literature in the Modern Culture
Summary: 5 Stars
"Exit Ghost" is the second Philip Roth book that I've read. I read the first, "Everyman," a few months ago, and it convinced me that I'd been foolishly wrongheaded about not reading Roth earlier in my life. I had falsely believed that his male-centered themes and characters might hold no interest for me, a woman who came of age during the 1970s feminist movement. But my experience with these two books has taught me otherwise. Roth is every bit the national literary treasure that others proclaim, and he can be read with pleasure by even dyed-in-the-wool aging feminists, like me. Personally, I might not like the main male characters in his books, but Roth takes me deep into their souls and I emerge with a better understanding of the human condition.
"Exit Ghost" is complete in itself. I enjoyed it thoroughly and did not feel confused as if I needed to know some prior information about the character to understand what was happening from another book in the series. But now, that I've read the plot summary of the first book in the series, I am intellectually curious to find out all the hidden parallels that escaped me.
The novel entertained me with its story, but I can't imagine anyone reading Roth purely for the story line. It seems obvious that Roth is read foremost to experience his skill as a writer, and second to hear what this man has to say about major issues of our time. Roth uses his works as a pulpit to preach about important issues that concern him.
In this novel, Roth analyzes the declining state of literature in the modern world and proclaims it dead. At one point, the main character, Nathan Zuckerman, rants: "the predominant uses to which literature is now put in the culture pages of the enlightened newspapers and in university English departments are so destructively at odds with the aims of imaginative writing, as well as with the rewards that literature affords to an open-minded reader, that it would be better if literature were no longer put to any public use."
In an interview with Roth about "Exit Ghost" published in "The Independent" (London, 10/3/07), he says: "Writers have always been extremely marginal to the cultural concerns of American citizens, but there was a moment when there were books that interested the general public that were written by some fine writers... Then the attention of readers has shifted away. They've been overcome by so many other distractions; and the habit of concentration I think has been badly damaged, by the nature of the cultural stimuli. So it feels to me very much like a dying moment, for literary culture in my own country--but you can't have computers and iPods and BlackBerries and blueberries and raspberries, and have time left to sit for two or three hours with a book."
There is another important theme repeated throughout this work: don't judge authors by the conduct of their lives, but rather on the content of their works. Envisioning his own life story in the hands of a future biographer, Zuckerman asks: "How will I have failed to be the model human being? My great, unseemly secret. Surely there was one. Surely there was more than one. An astonishing thing it is, too, that one's prowess and achievement, such as they have been, should find their consummation in the retribution of biographical inquisition. The man in control of the words, the man making up the stories all his life, winds up, after death, remembered, if at all, for a story made up about him, his covert brand of baseness discovered and described with uncompromising candor, clarity, self-certainty, with grave concern for the most delicate issues of morality, and with no small measure of delight."
This is a dark and angry book, full of fury and disgust for the failure of aging bodies, the marginalization of literature in the modern world, and a great deal of modern culture in general. It is powerful stuff. I recommend it highly.
Book Review: No easy answers
Summary: 4 Stars
After living as a hermit in a forest cabin for 11 years, Nathan Zuckerman, now 71, must head to New York for surgery. A shadow of his hungrily virile, robust self, he is now unable to control his urine flow. Driven to restore some of his once-mighty phallus's dignity, he seeks out prostate surgery. He is worn and tired; these early descriptions of his life in the cabin and the surgery are at once suavely comic and tenderly sad, while still preserving the nobility of his solitude.
Zuckerman sees in a classified ad that a couple is looking to swap their yuppie apartment for a cabin in the woods for one year. Rashly deciding to make the switch, he meets them and becomes boyishly infatuated with the 30-year-old wife, Jamie. Later in New York, he also meets Richard Kliman, a college boyfriend of Jamie's who is doggedly collecting research for a book about E.I. Lonoff. Kliman etches out a secret to Zuckerman, who believes it would shatter Lonoff in the eyes of the "literary" public, a group he believes now considers muckraking tabloid news of writers to be worthy of serious cultural attention.
Zuckerman's manifestation of his infatuation is done largely through fantasy. He craves moments just to be in the same room as her, even in the presence of her husband. He writes a dialogue between "he" and "she" to play out all the conversations he wishes he could have with her. Knowing the absurd fantasy he is letting himself into, considering it alongside the rash choice to move to New York, Zuckerman says of the dialogues: "If ever there was something that didn't need doing, it's this. Now you are taken up with her totally." Zuckerman is never reduced to pathetic old man status, never too clingy or needy; instead, he is constantly confronted by the invigorating and destructive desires that he thought he had lost. In his own words, he is a "taunted old man dying to be whole again." The plain and direct prose is rich with subdued emotional ennui.
His battle against Kliman goes similarly. Zuckerman considers him a dog interested only in destroying a great man's success to start his own career. The similarities drawn between Zuckerman and Lonoff make clear the personal implications for him. He considers this a moral battle of sorts, one that riles him up as much as his feelings for Jamie.
Through both of these dramas, Zuckerman resembles a force-tranquilized, caged animal rebelling against his keepers. Everything must be done with consideration: conversations must be logged to be remembered, Kliman's tormenting youth constantly must be abated and Jamie's addictive presence is as much a source of frustration as of life. Death and life taunt the anachronistic man. After 11 years of singular isolation, he has returned to a world not his own --- this is not his New York, these are not his intellectuals (their intense despairing about Bush's re-election is hilariously overwrought to us and alien to him). Roth sympathetically sculpts Zuckerman's looming sense of fear of the world trying to pick him apart and his commitment to remaining in it, despite the ease with which he could return to his cabin. And yet Roth does this without maudlin heavy-handedness: EXIT GHOST has no pretensions --- its honesty is one of its greatest strengths. Zuckerman's conflicted inner world is a profound portrait of a dying man.
Roth gives no easy answers to what it feels like to have the stuff of one's self melt away. But we see the experience easily enough through Zuckerman. Death, it appears, provokes global reactions: one does not merely confront it in one's mind --- it feels as if the whole world is pressing down, slicing away liberties and confining everything to a small cage. In Zuckerman's journey we see few "universal life lessons" or other such cheap tricks; Roth does not stoop to that banal level. Instead, we are given insight into a man who shows us why an injured, still-proud predator refuses to close its eyes and die.
--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz
Book Review: down goes Zuckerman
Summary: 4 Stars
"Exit Ghost" reads like a short story that is of novel length. It is, in scope, a snapshot. The characters are instantly familiar. One of Philip Roth's veteren alter egos Nathan Zuckerman, making his tenth appearance (the first a cameo, 1974, "My Life As A Man"), crosses paths with one ghost, E.I. Lonoff, and a ghost of a living person, Lonoff's former mistress Amy Bellete, from Zuckerman's first stint as narrator-in-chief back in 1979, in the novel "The Ghost Writer." "Exit Ghost" takes place over a short period of time. And not much actually happens. Zuckerman, who in the past was witness to the shameful debilitating ailments of others (his brother, for example, in "The Counterlife" - not to mention a long roster of other physical wrecks we've been introduced to in the opening pages, or sometimes opening lines, of a good Roth book: his palsied father in "Patrimony," the prostrate battling Mickey Sabbath from "Sabbath's Theater"; Roth himself, having a drug addled nervous breakdown in "Operation Shylock") - has suffered maybe the final humiliating blow of a failing body: he is incontinent. In permanent retreat in remote New England, where he can shield himself from the bad news of the day - identified as Bush's reelection and the still raw wounds of 9/11 - he is enticed back to New York City for a radical procedure that, he hopes, might allow him simply to control his bladder. Such is the purported high-stakes that launch this novel, and it will do. What happens next are a series of intrigues that rattle Zuckerman's cage for a while, but ultimately end up like the hapless, comically inept procedures he undergoes. A young, sharp provocateur named Kliman has threatened to expose a horrible secret about E.I. Lonoff. Rallied to try to protect the legacy of his idol, Zuckerman reconnects with Bellette, only to find she is a virtually penniless, illness-ravaged, mentally failing old woman, with little will or ability to help derail the scandal. Moving in on the periphery is the provocateur's purported mistress, a smart, good-looking writer named Jamie Logan who, along with her young writer husband, idolize Zuckerman. As the Lonoff intrigue comes in and out of focus, Zuckerman, incontinence raging, attempts a seduction, only to find his attempt is better suited as a fictional dialogue Zuckerman writes out at length, with Zuckerman playing the character of "He," and Jamie Logan playing the role of "She."
It may be easy to complain that the material here is thin, but that's not really accurate. "Exit Ghost" is costructed as Zuckerman's last stand. As iconic as he's been leading some of the strongest literature of the last thirty years - "The Counterlife" and "American Pastoral" in particular - we long for greatness. We want a sweeping, all-encompassing last movement. Instead we get a shambling, fairly hapless hero. Which is kind of where we started. The young wide-eyed writer in "The Ghost Writer" had no more ability to pull off a brilliant seduction in 1979 than he does now, as an ailing, broken down man. His elaborate imagination is what salvaged him then, and it is the same now. Roth is in full circle mode here, and we should appreciate the cycle. So our man goes out with a whimper. That's not actually a criticism.
Book Review: The Final Chapter
Summary: 3 Stars
"In a Mobius striptease, the disrobing stripper is always on the point of getting dressed again, and there is no resolution to the revelation.
'A Mobius striptease in written form, Philip Roth's new novel, "Exit Ghost," is purportedly his long-running character Nathan Zuckerman's new novel, narrated in the first person. During the course of Nathan Zuckerman's new novel, Zuckerman raises the question of whether an author's personal biography should ever be drawn into any discussion about his works of art. The answer seems to be that any reader who might want to do so must be a bit of a klutz." Clive James
Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth's, alter ego is lucky in one aspect- he does not die as the character did in 'Everyman'. He is , however, forever asking the question should his life be memorialized in book form. Really, it does not matter to me. This book fell short because of the continued quest for truth in advertising. Nathan is 71, lives in upstate Massachusetts, he is a loner and is seemingly satisfied by this lifestyle. He goes to his old stomping grounds, NYC, to undergo a procedure to alleviate the leakage of urine from a prostatectomy. He is hopeful this will be successful. While he is in New York he inadvertently reads an ad to exchange homes for a year. Something clicks and he finds himself in an apartment of a young couple and has made a deal to switch apartments. What does this mean? How did this happen? The rest of the novel essentially revolves around the couple, this decision and an author friend of Nathans. In reality Nathan's life is swimming before his eyes and his sexuality that he has lost is remembered to the full. The novel gets lost sometimes within these story lines and frankly becomes boring. There are conversations that take place in Nathan's mind. Philip Roth has always been fascinated by and with sex. Every book is filled with women that the main character fantasizes about. This is no different, fantasies aplenty. Fulfillment, well wait and see.
"Exit Ghost." Great title. The book of a great writer. A great book? Maybe it's just another piece of a puzzle. A great puzzle, and true to life in being so. In these strange and wonderful books that he writes under or about another name than his, Roth has been mapping the geography in an area of life where only his literary heroes ." Clive James
A book that is fascinating. It titillates and disappoints. It bores and it refreshes. It is the final chapter of Nathan Zuckerman. Adios.
Recommended prisrob 11-30-07
Everyman
Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue 1979-1985: The Ghost Writer / Zuckerman Unbound / The Anatomy Lesson / The Prague Orgy (Library of America #175)