Ghost Writer
by Philip Roth
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Book Summary Information
Author: Philip RothEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-06-02
ISBN: 0099477572
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Random House
Book Reviews of Ghost Writer
Book Review: Exploring creative writing as art, religion, drudgery, and sacrifice
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently read "Exit Ghost," the last book in the Zuckerman series, and vowed I would read the first book in the series, "Ghost Writer," because I wanted to uncover whatever parallels I might find that would further my enjoyment and understanding. Let me say from the beginning that I thoroughly enjoyed both books. There is hardly a page of Roth's writing that doesn't amuse, fascinate, enthrall, or generally cause my brain to flare up with pure intellectual delight. Roth is surely a national literary treasure.
"Ghost Writer" is a novella about authors, the process of creative writing, and the nature, meaning, and techniques of fiction itself.
The overall plot of "Ghost Writer" is simple, but it masks layers of thematic complexity. The story concerns accomplished, successful 43-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, reminiscing about his first meeting as a 23-year-old aspiring author with his idol, the famous, but reclusive writer E. I. (Manny) Lonoff. Zuckerman manages to get an invitation to the author's home in the Berkshire countryside. There he meets Lonoff, his wife, Hope, and Lonoff's beautiful young assistant, Amy Bellette. It is obvious from the conversations he hears directly, as well as those he overhears in private, that bald, hefty 60-plus-year-old Lonoff appears to be having some type of strange love affair with his beautiful college-age assistant, and that his wife is well aware of this fact. Zuckerman is strongly attracted to Amy and has wild fantasies about her past as a Jewish war orphan, as well as about her current relationship with Lonoff. During his visit, a winter storm arrives making travel difficult. Lonoff politely invites the young writer to spend the night on the day bed in his study. Zuckerman accepts, but is too excited to sleep. During his long night alone in Lonoff's study, we enter Zuckerman's mind as he speculates, fantasizes, and toys with all the random resonant chords of memory that float up to his consciousness, and spin out of his fertile mind as fully perfected stories.
Over the course of the evening and the next morning, Zuckerman begins to see that his idol is not a very good human being. Lonoff may be a great writer, but he has completely sacrificed his life, and the lives of those near and dear to him, for the sake of his art. He is monomaniacally self-absorbed--a man who lives entirely through his art.
Zuckerman also learns that Amy Bellette actually believes that she is Anne Frank hiding from the world under a false name because, if the world knew that she was alive, the impact and validity of her literary art would be put in question. Thus, even though she is obviously under some type of crazed self-delusion, Amy is also another artist sacrificing her life for her art. On Lonoff's desk is a quote from yet another literary giant of self-sacrifice, Henry James: "We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
Toward the end of the novella, Hope Lonoff packs her bags and walks out on her husband of 35 years. She is fed up with the fact that her husband is having an affair with his young assistant. Roth creates a priceless scene of total rage. The voice is spot-on perfect! And, for one who failed to read Roth for more than 30 years precisely because I felt he had no message that a feminist like myself might want to hear, I was amazed to read breath-taking accuracy in Hope Lonoff's raging dialog. This dialog has my vote for being one of the best tongue-lashings in contemporary fiction from a wife against a cheating husband. While exiting their home with her bags packed, she faces Lonoff, Amy, and Zuckerman and rages: "she thinks it will all be the religion of art up here. Oh! Will it ever! Let her try to please you, Manny! Let her serve as the backdrop for your thoughts for thirty-five years. Let her see how noble and heroic you are by the twenty-seventh draft... Yes, have her run hot baths for your poor back twice a day and then go a week without being talked to--let alone being touched in bed...I'm going to Boston. I'm going to Europe. It's too late to touch me now. I'm taking a trip around the world and never coming back. And you!...You won't go anywhere, you won't see anything, you won't even go out to dinner...There is his religion of art, my young successor--rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of, and you will now be the person who he is not living with."
So, not only is this novel about the art and the process of fiction, it is also a work about one very important day in the life of a budding young creative writer--the day he meets, and subsequently rejects his literary idol, and in the process, comes into his own literary manhood. No longer an insecure, budding author needing a mentor, he leaves Lonoff's house a self-secure adult--a man certain of his successful life ahead as a creative writer, and equally confident that he will be able to achieve this goal while still maintaining a whole life. Unlike Lonoff, Zuckerman will be a writer that will still be connected to the world, and therefore in a better position to translate that connectivity into artful prose.
There are many parallels between "Ghost Writer" and "Exit Ghost." If you haven't read the last book in the Zuckerman series, "Exit Ghost," I do not want to spoil it by telling you how the themes and characters in "Ghost Writer" reappear, but trust me, the effect is intellectually dazzling! In the end, the Zuckerman series comes full circle...as only great fiction can.
I heartily recommend reading these two books. I read them out of order; personally, I don't think it matters in which order they are read. And, yes, for the curious out there, I certainly do plan to read the rest of the books in this series...but not all at once. With this author, I would rather savor each book with a half a dozen or more lighter books by other writers in between. I do that with all the authors I love best. It makes coming back to the best all that more satisfying.
Summary of Ghost Writer
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s; a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his literary idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life...The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency - and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.A middle-aged writer recalls his younger self. At 23, Nathan Zuckerman has had four stories published and a small, flattering Saturday Review up-and-coming-author profile (complete with a photo of him playing with his ex-girlfriend's cat), which he purports to scorn. As genuine and polite as he seems, Zuckerman has already hurt his family with his autobiographical art and ruined his relationship with adultery and honesty. Visiting his reclusive idol (famed for his "blend of sympathy and pitilessness") in the Berkshires, the writer watches himself watching himself and attempts to confront his work and life. Instead he finds himself turning reality into metafiction. A quote he happens upon from Henry James only complicates matters further: "We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." Events, however, have their revenge, weaving more out of control than even he can anticipate or ask for. Philip Roth is the master of the uncomfortable, and his alter ego a connoisseur of self-involvement, self-loathing, and self-examination. ("Virtuous reader, if you think that after intercourse all animals are sad, try masturbating on the daybed in E. I. Lonoff's study and see how you feel when it's over.")
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